Driving on the tail of catastrophe; Towards an understanding of the risk managing interaction between driver, vehicle, automation, traffic, and infrastructure

The daunting complexity of traffic and the vast amount of potential risks that lurk in this spatially and dynamically complex work domain should be sufficient to keep all drivers parked. The question addressed herein is how drivers are able to manage these risks to fulfil their mobility and transport needs with such astoundingly few crashes. The network of constraints, rules, and like-minded fellow road users, that permeate the traffic environment, offers a work domain where reliable predictions can be made that essentially provide a spatiotemporal buffer zones within which drivers can gain a certain level of confidence and expected safety that enables them to perform the set of multi-tasks that comprise driving in the context of other non-driving related activities. In order to understand and support drivers in managing work domain complexity that exceed their expectations and abilities, it is necessary to have sensitive measures that can detect when and why a driver is challenged in managing risk. The mismatch between behavioral complexity and work domain complexity is hypothesized as a useful indicator for drivers´ difficulty in risk management. A behavioral complexity framework is introduced to support the hypothesis that a mismatch between behavioral and work-domain complexity is associated with some form of discrepancy between the momentary knowledge or ability that a driver needs and the knowledge or ability he has and that this mismatch results in elevated risk