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Article published In:
Interaction Studies
Vol. 24:3 (2023) ► pp.362–379

Coordination between vehicles in traffic

Accounting for the use of direction lights based on observations in North-East Italy

ORCID logo | HIT, Human Inspired Technologies Research Centre | Università degli Studi di Padova
ORCID logo | HIT, Human Inspired Technologies Research Centre | Università degli Studi di Padova
This study belongs to the ethnomethodological tradition of identifying the everyday practices accounting for the oiled machinery of social organization and applies this approach to understanding direction light usage. We observe a set of episodes videorecorded in North-East Italy in the urban traffic. We first unpack the meaning of direction light usage from a pragmatic perspective and then test our interpretation against the cases in our collection that seem to deviate from it. We argue that direction lights’ usage works as an announcement to some road users and a request to a subset of them; in both cases, direction lights convey contextualized (indexical) coordinates about the vehicle’s prospective trajectory. We then explain the cases in which signaling is omitted and draw some implications for traffic coordination and safety.
Keywords: coordination practices, driver-to-driver interaction, traffic, direction lights
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Materials and method
  • Results
    • Actions performed when using direction lights
    • Omissions
    • Impossibilities
  • Conclusions
  • Declarations of interest
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 15 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.22014.mas
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