Gaps, risks, and unwritten rules of the road: How road-user interactions differ across cultures

This project explores how drivers interact and communicate on the road in the UK and Malaysia.

Drivers are constantly interacting on the road using a mixture of communicative cues. These may be explicit (e.g. indicators) or implicit (e.g. vehicle movement) however there will also be a large amount of communication which arises from the unwritten rules of the road in a particular environment (e.g. using headlight flashes to communicate).

Most of what we know about driver communication comes from high-income Western countries. Yet 90% of the world’s road accidents happen in low-and-middle-income countries, where road user behaviour is very different.

To develop automated vehicles (AVs) which are safe and trusted across the globe we need a better understanding of how road users interact in different cultural settings. However, we don’t yet know whether previous findings translate from one setting to another.

This project aims to address this issue, by directly comparing interactions and communication between road users from two countries with radically different accident and fatality rates: the UK and Malaysia. Using a combination of driving simulation studies and on-road observations we hope to gain a deeper understanding of how drivers from both countries use and interpret different communicative cues on the road.

Impact

This research could shape how we design road safety interventions, especially in countries like Malaysia and other low-and-middle-income countries facing high accident rates.

Our findings will also help inform the development of AVs, by revealing which cues drivers rely on during interactions and whether these vary across cultures. If they do, it suggests AVs may need to adapt to local driving norms to operate safely and be trusted worldwide. The results could also benefit international drivers by highlighting the importance of understanding local road behaviours when driving abroad.