| Summary: | ICTCT (International Co-operation on Theories and Concepts in Traffic Safety) held its 33rd annual conference on the 28th and 29th of October 2021. The conference was held on-line due to the COVID19 pandemic. The practical organisation was in the hands of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). This special issue presents a selection of papers that were presented at the conference and that were subsequently accepted for publication in Transactions on Transport Sciences following the journal's reviewing procedure. The aim of the conference was to discuss a broad range of road safety topics with a special focus on research questions and challenges related to safer active urban mobility. Keynote speeches were given by Merja Spott of the Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate Protection in Berlin, and by Wolfgang Fastenmeier, professor Traffic and Transport Psychology at the Psychological University of Berlin. First established in 1977, ICTCT was an initiative instigated by researchers who wanted to work together on developing traffic conflict techniques as a complement to injury and accident data for research, diagnosis and evaluation purposes. Later, ICTCT's focus widened to include theories and methods enabling researchers and practitioners to work on road safety without having to rely solely on scarce or insufficient accident and injury data. Since then, ICTCT has organised annual thematic conferences. The 8 papers selected for this special issue vary with respect to the topics dealt with and the approaches followed. Two papers look at a more methodological perspective. Jakobowsky et al. compare two traffic conflict techniques to assess encounters in shared space environments: the Swedish traffic conflicts technique (STCT) and the pedestrian-vehicle conflicts analysis (PVCA). While both techniques yielded similar results, this could not be confirmed for all the assessed encounters. Gruden et al. assessed the performance of a pedestrian crossing time prediction model by comparing it's outputs with a microsimulation model. Other papers provide interesting examples of how human responses to changing environments can be assessed. Gitelman et al. analyzed accident data and video footage in order to assess the mobility and safety impacts of a trial to allow motorcycles on bus lanes. Usage rates of the bus lanes by motorcyclists increased, but less than could have been expected. Campise et al. surveyed emotional and psychological impacts of COVID-19 on public transport choices. Future will reveal how fundamental the impact of sanitary restrictions on perception and use of public transport systems will turn out to be. Gitelman & Korchatov explored the safety level of a signalized roundabout with crossing bus rapid transit by analysing video recordings. The pilot demonstrated how useful a thorough analysis of observed behaviour in real-world conditions can be, even if results cannot directly be generalized. Junghans et al. used video recordings to assess the real-world consequences of employing a SAE3-level test vehicle. Their work underpins the further development of algorithms that try to optimize efficiency aspects of automated vehicles, without relaxing safety requirements. Bärwolff et al. investigated pedestrian a
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