A Systems Thinking Approach To Road Safety: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Road traffic fatalities in India exceed 150,000 annually, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying unsafe interactions between different road user types in heterogeneous mixed traffic remain largely unexamined. This study applies Distributed Situation Awareness theory, grounded in distributed cognition, to investigate how car drivers, two-wheeler riders, and pedestrians structure and create and maintain their situational awareness while navigating shared urban road space in Patiala, Punjab, India. Thirty participants navigated a 16km route while providing concurrent think-aloud verbal protocols. Transcripts were analysed using semantic network construction and word frequency analysis in Python 3, generating structural metrics including density, diameter, and centrality for each group. Network analysis revealed a structural gradient across groups. Car drivers produced a highly integrated network organised around infrastructure cues, two-wheeler riders showed a moderately dense network centred on gap assessment and social negotiation, and pedestrians produced a fragmented network structured around episodic crossing events. Semantic analysis further identified both shared and unique concepts across road user groups, revealing differences in the organisation of awareness. While motorised road users demonstrated overlap in networks, pedestrians exhibited distinct patterns of awareness associated with crossing, gap assessment, and interaction with traffic. The findings confirm that DSA produces coherent results in heterogeneous non-lane-based traffic and extend the framework's empirical base beyond Western contexts.