What constitutes traffic event severity in terms of human danger perception?

•The study aim is to investigate the objective surrogate safety indicators that contribute most to explaining and resembling humans’ internal traffic danger perception mechanism.•Presence of an evasive action is as an important component in the perceived severity of the situation.•Initial conditions of a traffic event, defined as a start of an evasive action, contain the most important information for explaining its severity.•No single indicator was able to sufficiently explain human perception of danger.•Variables related to both proximity and collision consequences are important and should be integrated into severity measures.