Affective dimensions of perceived safety for older adults’ mobility in urban Indonesia

Engineering notes

Key topics: autonomous driving, perception, planning. See the paper for implementation details and experimental results.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Safety has long been a central concern in transport research, recurring across domains such as road safety, transport planning, and travel behaviour. Existing studies have examined safety through diverse lenses including traffic risk, accident assessment, and experiences of harassment, underscoring that safety is not merely a technical property of transport systems but a socially differentiated and context dependent experience. This paper examines how perceived safety functions as a central component of mobility for older adults in urban Indonesia. For older adults, mobility is not only functional but central to sustaining social participation, access to everyday necessities, and a sense of wellbeing in later life. Yet older adults often face barriers associated with ageing-related health limitations and heightened exposure to unsafe built environments. Drawing on in-depth interviews, go-along interviews, and observations in two Indonesian cities, this study conceptualizes perceived safety as an embodied and relational experience mediated through affect and emotion in everyday mobility. From the perspective of older adults in Indonesia, fear, uncertainty, and emotional strain emerge through repeated encounters with uneven infrastructure, mixed traffic environments, and limited transport services. However, these experiences are not solely characterised by vulnerability; they are also shaped by everyday practices of adaptation, endurance, and tacit acceptance through which older adults continue to navigate and participate in urban life. Both negative and positive affects generate different responses, shaping mobility decisions in iterative ways and producing nuanced perceptions of safety that intersect with financial constraints, health conditions, access to transport modes, and infrastructural conditions. By foregrounding affect and emotion, this paper moves beyond narrow interpretations of safety as accident or crime risk and shows how safety is continuously sensed, negotiated, and reformulated through everyday mobility practices.

Links and sources

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