Road safety and user behaviour

The traditional hypothesis about road safety and traffic psychology is that road user behaviour depends on risk. In this paper the authors verify the theory of risk homeostasis, i.e. that road user behaviour depends on the difference between the perceived risk and the risk budget. The paper aims at 1. finding out what the perceived risk factors are and what the risk budget depends on; 2. foreseeing the consequences of the road user behaviour. In the final part an analysis of accidental data controls the proposed hypothesis. The conclusion is that the risk R consists of two different forms of risk: external risk Re, depending on the external reality, and internal risk Ri, depending on the unconscious reality.