Risk homeostasis theory and its critics: time for an agreement

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Abstract
It is argued that the present state of indetermination regarding the theory of risk homeostasis in traffic (RHT) needs to be resolved, and that the following elements can serve as a basis for future concerted efforts directed towards the modelling of road users' decision making in traffic: (1) risk taking must be considered as part of a more general utility-maximizing process; (2)partial compensation instead of exact homeostasis must be considered to be the rule, as a response of road users to safety ‘hardware’ improvement; (3)the development of hierarchical models of risk taking in traffic is required, in order to deal adequately with independence and interdependence of information processing at different levels of the driving task.