Traffic engineering aims to control infrastructure and population behaviour to achieve optimal usage of road networks. Fairness is fundamental to stimulate cooperation in large populations, and plays an important role in traffic engineering, as it increases the well-being of users, improves driving safety by rule adherence, and overcomes public resistance at legislative implementation. Despite the importance of fairness, only a few works have translated fairness into the transportation domain, with a focus on transportation planning rather than traffic engineering. Moreover, existing works in traffic engineering discuss fairness superficially and insufficiently, focussing on only a few definitions. The mission of this work is (i) to challenge narrowly specified, efficiency-oriented engineering formulations in traffic engineering, (ii) to establish a link to modern fairness theories, and (iii) to highlight the importance of fairness when allocating scarce, public good, mobility resources between road users. To achieve this, a mode-agnostic, distributive fairness framework for mobility resource allocation is proposed. It serves when designing traffic engineering solutions, and convinces in public debates with a useful, argumentative tool-set to confront equity considerations. Ultimately, this enables systematic research and design of fairness-informed control systems, demonstrated by three case studies on signalized intersection management and static road pricing.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) and traffic control promise substantial efficiency and safety improvements but frequently face public resistance and driver compliance issues. Many drivers perceive such control measures as unfair or unnecessary, despite measurable system-wide benefits. This study investigates how chronoception—the subjective perception of time—affects user acceptance of ITS control strategies and how signal design can be adapted to reduce perceived delays. We introduce a chronoceptive design framework that integrates insights from cognitive psychology into traffic-control design. Using ramp metering as a case study, we conduct virtual experience stated preference experiments with 101 participants, comparing standard and chronoceptive ramp metering designs featuring shorter signal cycles, three-phase lights, and countdown timers. The results show that chronoceptive signal designs significantly improve user acceptance (by up to 12%) and reduce perceived waiting times, despite identical or slightly longer objective travel times. These findings reveal a systematic bias between factual and perceived benefits and highlight the potential of chronoceptive design to enhance compliance and fairness perception. This study contributes a new human-centred design paradigm for traffic control that aligns objective performance with user perception and outlines how chronoception and perceived fairness can be operationalised in traffic control.