Quick to Assume

This article discusses how road design can act as a primary aid to speed enforcement. There are a number of infrastructural measures that can be implemented to improve drivers’ behavior and support enforcement of road traffic law. The objective of these measures are to prevent most violations from occurring, influencing unintentional behavior or at least preventing errors and unintentional violations, leaving the police and enforcement agencies to better target resources towards drivers who still and/or severely violate the rules. Infrastructure can support drivers by providing cues that are meant to affect both conscious and unconscious behavior. By providing continuous feedback about location-specific rules, drivers are provided with instantaneous and explicit knowledge of what rules are in place, for instance when they have missed the posted speed limit. A logical fit of road layout and location-specific rules provides support for better and more natural or intuitive compliance. This fit can also support the predictability of rules and the behavior of other road users on a road, Recognizable Roads, and so the implicit expectations of drivers. Research has shown that supporting expectations of drivers decreases the probability that they miss important information and make errors that can result in a crash. This idea of implicit and explicit information by road design and layout is linked to the concept of Self-Explaining Roads (SER). In the Netherlands, the predictability of roads concept is preferred.