Roads designed for
human experience

Evidence of Need

The road safety gap we're not measuring

The heavy vehicle industry remains a major focus of road safety policy, due to the severity and societal impact of crashes involving large freight vehicles. According to the Australian Government's National Road Safety Data Hub, 210 people died in crashes involving heavy vehicles in the 12 months to September 2025, representing an increase of 14.8% compared with the previous year (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts, 2025). National road safety strategy materials also note that heavy vehicles are involved in approximately 18% of road crash deaths in Australia, despite representing a smaller proportion of the vehicle fleet (National Road Safety Strategy, n.d.).

Beyond the human toll, road trauma carries significant economic consequences for the Australian population. The Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) estimates the annual social cost of road crashes in Australia at approximately $27 billion, demonstrating the scale of the safety and economic burden associated with road incidents across the network (BITRE, 2022).

These figures highlight the ongoing need to strengthen safety outcomes across heavy vehicle operations. While progress has been made through improvements in vehicle design, regulatory frameworks, and road engineering, current approaches still focus primarily on infrastructure compliance, hazard identification, and crash history analysis.

However, these approaches do not systematically account for how roads and journeys are experienced by drivers over time, even though driver experience sits at the centre of many of the human factors that directly and indirectly impact safety outcomes.

Driver experience is not a soft or peripheral issue. It is the lived human experience of operating a vehicle across a journey, and emerges from the interaction between the driver, the vehicle, the road, the job, and the wider journey context. Research in transport psychology and human factors emphasises that driving performance stems from this interaction between the driver, the driving task, and the surrounding environment, rather than from any single factor alone (May & Baldwin, 2009; Bates et al., 2019).

In practice, driver experience is shaped by a combination of physical, cognitive, emotional, and perceptual factors. These include driver workload, attentional demand, environmental stimulation, traffic complexity, perceived safety, fatigue, and the overall effort required to maintain vigilance and respond to changing conditions (May & Baldwin, 2009; Thiffault & Bergeron, 2003). In other words, driver experience is an emergent property of the whole driving situation, rather than a single variable.

This matters because drivers do not respond only to isolated hazards or formal compliance requirements. They respond to how the driving task feels and unfolds over time. When the experience of driving is undermined by the nature of the job, road conditions, operational pressures, or the structure of the journey itself, this can create the conditions for a range of human factors issues that weaken safety performance. These include fatigue, distraction, cognitive overload, cognitive underload, reduced vigilance, lower motivation, poorer decision-making, attentional drift, and delayed responses to changing conditions (May & Baldwin, 2009; Thiffault & Bergeron, 2003).

From this perspective, driver experience is fundamental to safety. Yet road design and road safety audit processes still tend to focus more narrowly on standards, compliance, discrete hazards, and crash history than on the holistic experience of driving across a corridor or journey.

Research consistently shows that driver performance during long-haul operations is shaped not only by compliance and physical road design, but by how the driving environment interacts with the cognitive and psychological demands of the task. This existing literature shows that driver experience is influenced by multiple interacting factors that in turn affect risk of incidents, including:

These findings help demonstrate that driver safety outcomes are shaped by how the driving task is experienced across the course of a journey, more than by isolated factors alone.

A growing body of research emphasises that road environments themselves influence driver vigilance, workload, and behavioural performance. Driving environments shape the cognitive and perceptual demands placed on drivers, influencing how the driving task is experienced across the course of a journey.

Studies examining driver cognition demonstrate that increasing environmental complexity (such as dense signage, traffic interactions, or visually complex road environments) can significantly increase drivers' cognitive workload and influence driving performance (Lyu et al., 2019).

These road environments have been found to influence driver experience through both underload and overload conditions. May and Baldwin (2009) note that task-related driving fatigue and performance deterioration can arise from two distinct forms of workload imbalance:

Research examining driver distraction and attention management further highlights how environmental and task demands compete for limited cognitive resources. Drivers must continuously allocate attention between the primary task of driving and competing demands in the driving environment, and increases in attentional demand can negatively affect performance and safety outcomes (Bates et al., 2019).

The existing empirical literature additionally highlights specific characteristics of road environments that contribute to driver alertness and behavioural performance. Key findings include:

Together, these findings highlight that road environments influence the cognitive and perceptual experience of driving, shaping vigilance, workload, and decision-making performance across the duration of a journey. Understanding these experience-related pressures is therefore critical for identifying road segments and corridor conditions that may contribute to behavioural risk.

Australian road design guidance already recognises the relevance of driver workload and cognitive demand, although these concepts are not yet systematically incorporated into road safety assessment tools.

For example, the Road Planning and Design Manual (2nd ed.) published by the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads emphasises that driver workload has a direct impact on driving performance and that road environments should be designed to maintain appropriate levels of driver engagement and avoid abrupt increases in cognitive demand (Department of Transport and Main Roads Queensland, 2025). Guidance within the manual notes that environments that are either overly monotonous or excessively complex can negatively influence driver performance by reducing vigilance or overloading drivers with information.

Austroads guidance similarly recognises driver workload and human factors as relevant to road environment safety management and road design practice (Austroads, 2017). Despite this recognition, road safety audit processes remain primarily focused on infrastructure compliance, discrete hazards, and crash history (Austroads, 2022).

Although human factors are increasingly acknowledged in road design guidance, a significant industry gap remains. Currently:

As a result, road networks continue to be evaluated primarily through infrastructure design standards, engineering compliance and historical crash statistics, rather than through a systematic understanding of how journey environments shape driver experience and behaviour across long-haul operations.

The Road UX project responds directly to this need established through the existing literature and research.

By establishing a Road Experience Audit Framework and developing an AI-enabled diagnostic toolkit, the project introduces a structured, data-driven method for analysing how road environments and journey contexts influence driver experience.

This capability will enable the heavy vehicle industry to:

By making driver experience measurable and diagnosable, this project introduces a new layer of safety intelligence capable of supporting safer freight operations across the wide variety of our road networks.