Impact of roadside landscape to driving behavior : a study with reference to Southern Highway

Abstract

The highways, road networks, and other transportation links in cities hold an important role in connecting a network of cities but, at the same time, it had created more issues towards quality of the habitation when consider current cities. Lack of Safety on Roads becomes a major issue in the developed and developing world due to over population of humans as well as vehicles, which lead to many fatal incidents than any other course. There are many factors which affects accidents on roads and among those factors, the ‘Driving behavior’ plays a crucial role in Road Safety. Driving is an action of humans, which allows him/her motion through space from place to place. The road landscape creates the character and the spatial quality, of the space that the driver move through. The rate of information gathered from the surrounding context is vital to decide the driving safe. The accuracy of the information for a safe driving action depends on the visual perception of the driver. ‘Southern Expressway’, which was introduced recently, allowed people to move quickly from Western to Southern destinations of Sri Lanka and time to time accidents were also recorded. So, the spatial qualities of the existing road landscape might have impacted on the accidents happened on Southern Highway from its initiation, which was the hypothesis of the research. The study focused on identifying the spatial characteristics of Southern Highway by Data collection and Data analysis. Data is collected by two means, then analyzed based on accidents recorded and “Black-Spots” were identified, live recording of the expressway was analyzed to understand the spatial characteristics in the identified ‘Black-spots’. In conclusion, the study focus on to analyze the significant spatial characteristics of Road Landscape in Southern highway, and reveal that there is a direct influence from the spatial characteristics in identified accident Black-spots. The study conclude to analyze only three spatial characteristics, due to the scope and time limitations and there is an opportunity to further studies in many other spatial characteristics in road landscape.