Could drivers’ visual behaviour influence road design?

The role of drivers is an important issue in the evaluation of new or existing roads to attain safe traffic operations. In accordance with the recent research about visual activity, in this paper, visual behaviour of a sample of drivers has been examined. Several trials has been made by means of an instrumented vehicle and a post process of image analysis. The results has permitted to propose some new synthetic indexes, correlated with the usual variables known by road engineers, that could represent a valid instrument to solve the most critical situations not yet highlighted by a collision occurrence.