Young Driver Focus

14th May 2014

Dr Lisa DornReader in Driver Behaviour

How to Profile Young DriversAnd target education

Introduction

• Driving test compulsory from 1935 – 80 years later?• Research on the benefits of driver education • Driver behaviour Vs driver skills• Driver profiling • Hazard perception training

Driver Education and Road Safety

• Methodological• No theory• Lack of evaluation studies• Small samples and no control groups• Crashes are difficult criterion measures

• Unintended Consequences• Earlier driver licensing increases crash risk • Increased confidence and optimism bias

• Educational Content• Short term in duration • One-size-fits-all philosophy• Focus on knowledge and skills

Driver Knowledge

• Driver knowledge - although young drivers demonstrated a thorough awareness that speeding may lead to crashes, they did not regard speeding as risky for themselves (Falk and Montgomery, 2007)

• Cranfield study of responses to Highway Code test and collisions and driving offences in the previous 6 months

• Increased knowledge of road rules shows little impact (Wahlberg and Dorn, 2012)

Skill Vs Behaviour

• In-vehicle driver trainingDriver skill improves with practice - automation of

information processing and psychomotor skill

• Behaviour-based approach to driver educationDriver behaviour motives, habits and driving style - may become less worried about safety over time

Young Driver Behaviour

• Drivers engage in illegal or risky driving without being involved in crashes

• Young drivers characterized by thrill seeking, aggression, and over confidence which leads to risk-taking

• Inexperienced drivers may not fully acknowledge the danger of impulsive decisions (e.g. mobile phone use, alcohol etc.)

• Durable behavioural patterns get established

Driver Behaviour Research

• Self evaluation and driver education (Hatakka et al., 2002)• Angry drivers who acknowledge their anger need different

interventions than those who are not aware of their problem (Deffenbacher et al., 2003)

• Brief coaching intervention using personality profiles showed fewer speeding convictions compared with control group (Paavar et al, 2013

• Resilience-focused education - significant reductions in crash involvement compared with driving-focused

(Senserrick et al, 2009)

Driver Risk Index

Situational RiskAge, driving experience, mileage, licence, crash history etc

Behavioural Risk FactorHazard Monitoring

Thrill SeekingFatigue Proneness

AggressionDislike of Driving

Coping Risk FactorEmotion Focus Coping

Avoidance CopingTask Focus CopingConfrontive Coping

Reappraisal

Correction FactorsImpression Management

Driver Confidence

DriverMetrics

Hazard Perception and Crash Involvement

• Hazard perception - only driving-specific skill associated with crash risk (Pelz and Krupat, 1974; TRRL, 1979; Quimby et al., 1986; Congdon,1999; McKenna and Horswill, 1999; Wells et al., 2008; Darby et al., 2009; Horswill et al., 2010a; Boufous et al., 2011; Cheng et al., 2011).

• 0.5 seconds visual search at junctions (Labbett and Langham., 2006)

• Virtually no insight into hazard perception skill - no relationship between self-assessments and objective measures (Horswill et al., 2011, 2012)

Hazard Perception Training

• Effects transferred to on-road driving (Chapman et al., 2002) • Increased novice driver skills to the level of experienced drivers

(Isler et al., 2009) • Improved hazard perception performance and eye-scanning

patterns (Pradhan et al., 2009)• Improved visual search in a driving simulator (Petzoldt et al., 2013)

and in real driving (Isler et al., 2011)• Reduced recidivism amongst offenders (Wahlberg, 2011) • Even experienced drivers benefit (Horswill et al., 2013)

Free schools programme

Where are we heading?

• To improve driving standards we need to move away from purely skills-based driver training

• Focused education based on driver behaviour profiles• Courses on interpreting profiles and driver coaching• Hazard perception training – not just testing!