Eye-Tracking Analysis of Proposed Signage Design to Prevent Accidents Caused by the Abrupt Appearance of Dividers on Indian Roads

The road transport system is expanding considerably in developing countries. Villages are connecting to major cities for business, education, health, and many other reasons because of road development and smooth transportation. There has been a rise in the number of road accidents observed, caused by abruptly appearing dividers on roads and a lack of required signage systems. This paper discusses scenarios of accidents due to such abruptly appearing dividers and offers a strategy to design appropriate signage to avoid road accidents in the future. It has been observed that permanent or movable arbitrary fixtures, such as a barricade or a small partition block wall, are installed to separate lanes, in addition to white-colored stripes that are typically employed for lane separation on roads. These fixtures, although they are intended as lane-dividing solutions on roads, cause serious, and at times, fatal accidents, due their sudden, uninitiated appearance on the road. To address this problem, alternative signage designs were designed and tested on Indian roads, based on human cognitive responses and visual attention analysis on signage using an eye-tracking method. In addition, the semantic quality and legibility of alternate signage designs were evaluated using a questionnaire to judge their overall efficacy. Hence, the best signage design solution is proposed for implementation near or before occurrences of road dividers to avoid accidents.