4 THE EFFECTS OF AIRPORT ROAD ACCESS DESIGN ON SENIOR DRIVERS’
4.7 Recommendation based on the Questionnaire
The most important factor in airport road design is to improve sight distance of an upcoming road conditions. Perception-reaction time improves by appropriate time available to react to airport road access condition. Table 4-4 shows the highlights of effective wayfinding, signage and road design based on this study.
Table 4-4 Recommendation of wayfinding design based on the questionnaire data
Signage
1. Airport directional signs with bigger size, larger font and identical than roadway signs are suggested.
2. Advance distance notification is required to navigate to airport.
3. Clearer and less complex signage are suggested.
4. Larger lettering on signs and pavement markings are recommended.
5. Better street lighting, particularly at intersections.
6. The symbol should be used on the advance warning sign.
7. The word “airport” on the signage would be helpful to avoid confusion to senior drivers.
Road design
1. Bright, luminous lane markings and directional signals are recommended.
2. Adding or widening the bend and turn lanes.
3. Wider lanes (e.g. roundabout and bend) and shoulders reduce the consequences of driving mistakes.
4. Longer acceleration lanes (e.g. junction) assist senior drivers who drive more slowly on merging.
5. Reduce the number of senior driver fatalities and severe injuries by addressing specific roadway features known to be most difficult for senior drivers.
4.8 Chapter Conclusion
There are three major environmental factors that ease driving orientation and airport road access wayfinding design. Firstly, the traffic sign of the driving scenario should be distinctive, unique and different. The airport ‘directional arrow’ sign should be bigger, have bolder text, be a different colour and different symbol than the other traffic signs. The airport road access wayfinding (including traffic signs) should be identical in term of size, colour and style to motorway signs. Message content should be easily understood so the senior drivers can differentiate and it should signify the navigation to the airport.
Therefore, it is very important that airport signs adhere to copy, styles and sizes, consistent terminology, symbols and uniform colours of the basic guiding principles standard functions.
Secondly, the attributes of driving simulation can be seen from various perspectives. For example, the ‘less complex’ scenario was developed with a
‘comfort’ driving environment, which allows drivers to view the routes and landmarks more easily. However, in the “More Complex” driving scenario, senior drivers required sign direction to be displayed as far as possible along the route to the airport. AASHTO (2010) and Australian International Airports (National Passenger Facilitation Committe, 2011) suggested that the element of
‘primary’ as a justification of signs placement is important to the driver.
Finally, as age increases, it is certain that general health and fitness will begin to deteriorate as senior drivers felt that their driving experience skills and driving abilities may not be as good as they once were. As a result, senior drivers developed more defensive and cautious driving behaviours as they grow older.
The senior drivers are commonly involved in collisions often because they have misjudged the speed or distance of other vehicles or fail to see a hazard (Chevalier et al., 2016; Cuenen et al., 2016; Department for Transport, 2015c;
Devlin and McGillivray, 2016; National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, 2011).
The study confirmed that the attention and ability of senior drivers to process signage and wayfinding information in airport road access wayfinding designs is
limited. These limitations create difficulties because driving requires the division of attention between control, guidance and navigational tasks by the senior drivers. Drivers’ attention can be switched frequently from one wayfinding information source to another. This means that senior drivers only attend well to one source at a time. For instance, while driving to the airport, they may only be able to extract a small proportion of the available information from the road scene (i.e. airport directional signs). Therefore, given a limited information processing capacity while driving, senior drivers can only determine acceptable information loads that they can manage. When senior drivers’ acceptable incoming information load is exceeded, they may neglect other information based on the level of importance (i.e. if a senior driver was looking for the word
‘airport’ on the sign, they tend to neglect the speed limit signs) (Mårdh, 2016).
As with decision making of any sort, error is possible during this process (Casutt et al., 2014).
In addition to information processing limitations, senior drivers’ attention is not fully within their conscious control. For senior drivers with some degree of experience, driving is a highly automated task. Driving can be performed while the driver is engaged in thinking about other matters. Most senior drivers, especially a frequent traveller to the airport or one who is familiar with the airport route, have experienced the phenomenon of becoming aware that they have not been paying attention during the last few miles of driving (e.g. airport staff).
5 CONCLUSIONS
Chapter 5 revisits the research aim and objectives, with the conclusions drawn from the work undertaken throughout this research being discussed in respect of these. It will begin by returning to the thesis structure presented in Chapter 1 to address the aims and the wider research objectives. Section 5.1 focusses on the association of the research aim and objectives with the conclusion. Contribution to the knowledge relating to the research aim is discussed in Section 5.2, followed with airport road access wayfinding policy recommendation in Section 5.3. All limitations during the research process have been highlighted in Section 5.4, with recommendations for future work described in Section 5.5. It is hoped that this research will be beneficial to airport management, road sign design professionals, road authorities, senior drivers and airport users as discussed in Section 5.6. This chapter then closes the thesis with concluding remarks.