Dear readers,

A warm welcome to our final Newsletter on the EU-Project MeBeSafe. Three and a half years of intense research and innovation action have passed by and now we find ourselves at the end of a great project on Measures for Behaving Safely in traffic.

Please allow me to resume some selected questions that reached us over the stretch of the project, as I personally do think the answers have the potential to shift light on relevant areas of the project.

How is MeBeSafe motivated? Safety has increased over the last two decades. The EU set ambitious goals in its 2011 Transport White Paper e.g. reducing fatalities close to zero in road transport by 2050. You may agree, today safety still is of primary concern for any transport system. I am convinced that expanding knowledge and further preventive interventions such as appropriate technologies (e.g. ACC), infrastructure (e.g. for speed reduction) as well as services (e.g. coaching) to reconcile safety with efficiency and user-friendliness, contribute significantly to these goals. MeBeSafe took this way and comes up with novel, preventive interventions.

There are already effective interventions out there. What is new about MeBeSafe? Proven effects of existing measures are not in question. The MeBeSafe approach goes one step beyond and takes advantage of existing measures. We wanted to understand human behaviour in interaction with these measures, make out room for improvement and come up with novel interventions, based on this knowledge. For instance, some conventional measures only intervene close to an incident or foster habituation. The MeBeSafe approach is to intervene early in time and to be on demand in order to work against habituation.

Understanding human behaviour better, what does that mean? It is common knowledge that human behaviour is one of the major causes for accidents. Habituation for example goes hand in hand with a degrading level of attention. A certain level of attention however, is precondition for safe driving. Using the concept of “nudging”, MeBeSafe developed and tested interventions that aim to work even if human behaviour is inappropriate.

Did MeBeSafe succeed? Well, today we are looking at the great, working interventions the excellent consortium came up with. For instance, the one I am looking at shown on the picture in the background is an infrastructure measure implemented in real traffic in Eindhoven (NL). We could show that it works. This and many more interesting stories you are invited to read in this final edition. Enjoy!

With my best regards,

Stefan