5. Psychology of Driving Flashcards
What is traffic psychology?
the study of the behaviour of road users and the psychological processes underlying that behaviour
aims to apply theoretical aspects of psychology to improve traffic mobility and to develop accident countermeasures
What are some theoretical aspects of traffic psychology?
- cognition, attention, memory, visual search
- decision making
- learning
- perception
- human factors (organisational psych)
- personality
- social psych
- developmental psych
- motivation
- biopsych
- health
- forensic (legal aspects of driving, law enforcement)
What is the challenge for road safety psychologists?
- to understand why a crash occurred
- could it have been prevented?? if so how?
- could we change the road to make it safer, could we enforce road rules more effectively, could we challenge the optimistic view that drivers hold about their driving skills?
Have to try and increase the perception that RISKS do not payoff
What is the challenge for traffic engineers?
- design roads to accommodate risky behaviour
Why is it such a problem in NSW in particular?
Road toll surges by 11.7% but…
the number of fatalities due to driving is by far the largest in NSW –> gone up by 23%
Comparison from this year to last year in NSW
This year: 218 lives lost, predicted 355 by the end of year
Last year: 203 lives lost, 313 at the end of the year.
Serious injuries: 10555 compared to 9711
Who are the ones dying most?
- the drivers and their passengers
- mostly a male problem
Fatalities in the past 12 months:
181 drivers
62 motorcyclists
47 pedestrians
61 passengers
4 cyclists
Why is there a particular problem in rural and remote areas in Australia?
- 66% of road deaths occur in regional and remote areas
- 11.8 per 100 000 Australisn in remote areas
–> road quality
–> unpaved shoulders?
–> wild life?
–> speed (most occurr in high speed zones of over 100km / hr)
–> fatigue (single vehical run-of crashes are 44% of all crashes in remote areas)
When did the positive trend reverse?
Since 1970 - downward trend of fatalities
has been reversed since 2022
Why the reversal in this trend?
- Change in the type of vehicles being bought and their size
- SUVs and Utes now account for 78.4% of total sales in 2023
- these are problematic for vulnerable road users
- increased aggressivity (measure of serious injury risk vehicles pose to other road users)
- increased crashworthiness (rating the ability to prevent severe injury to their own drivers in crashers)
Why the increase in aggressivity?
- high fronts on SUVs cause larger blind spots (upto 4m)
- higher point of impact means that pedestrians are more likely to suffer head / neck injuries - more likely to be knocked down and run over
- children are 8x more likely to die when struck by an SUV
Why are people buying vehicles that consume more petrol, damage roads and pose safety threats?
- feel safer (crashworthiness)
- tax benefits, they were exempt from luxury car tax (sometimes making cars 11k more)W
Why focus on fatalities?
- they tell us about road mistakes: who, where and when
- fatalities are more reliable and detailed source of stats
- allows us to see who is at most risk of dying on the roads, what was the immediate cause of the crash, and where crashes tend to occur
Age / inexperience as a risk factor?
- young drivers are at risk during provisional license stage (age based effect separate to experience)
- red ps is the most dangerous driver
Why are they vulnerable?
- headway time / distance between vehicles too short
- too fast for conditoins
- not looking far enough ahead when driving
- gap selections too small when making turns
- 40% of these crashes occur at night
Why are older drivers so vulnerable?
- more fragile
- impairments in vision, cognition, motor functions
- older drivers are more likely to experience crashes at intersections (right hand turn)
What are the fatal five risk behaviours?
Speeding –> 41% of road fatalities and 24% of serious injuries
Alcohol and drug driving
Failure to wear a seatbelt
Fatigue
Distraction and inattention
Speed
- high speed roads responsible for most fatal crashes (45% of all crashes occur in speed zones of over 100 km an hr, only 12% occur in speed zones of under 50 km)
- 50% of deaths result from head on crashes / single vehicle run off road crashes
- affects your field of vision (become more tunnel visioned)
- has a harder impact in crash (stop distances increase exponentially the faster you go)
Alcohol as a risk factor
- exponentially increases the risk of a crash and severity of outcome
- contribute to 40% of road fatalities annually (24% said to be due to illicit drugs)
Failure to wear a seatbelt
seatbelts are the best safety intervention
- 3 point seat belt = greatest safety invention
- Volvo engineer designed this
fatigue
- 2 dips in our wakefulness: 2pm in the afternoon, 2 am in the morning
Distraction and inattention
- arousal = how alert you are
- capacity / resources = limited attentional capacity to process information
- selective attention = allocation of attention
Attention is extremely limited commodity, unreleated matters can capture attention.
- optic distraction
- manual distraction
- mental distraction
Distractions reduce reaction time
What is vision zero based on?
Swedish parliament adopted a new long-term goal –> Vision zero is an ethical stance stating that is not acceptable for human mistkaes to have fatal consequences
We must create a system that can mitigate mistakes - focus on the roads, vehiles and those who use the road transport system.
What is the safe system approach?
Accommodates for human error and aims to ensure a safe transport system for all road users.
Create
- safe roads and roadsides, speeds, vehicles, road users
What’s a slip
attentional failure (distraction)
What’s a lapse
Memory failure - ommitting planned action
What’s a mistake
Rule and knowledge based mistakes - misapplication of a rule
What are some perceptual errors leading to unintentional errors
- rain = vision impairment (rain makes light sources less effective by filtering some of their light and reducing illumination)
- headlight beams reflect off rain
- rain reduces contrast
- fog alters peception of speed (makes objects appear to be moving more slowly than they really are
To make drivers safe we need to make them feel unsafe
need to increase the perception that risk sdon’t pay off
- individual raod users tend to under-estimate or ignore risks
- the idea that only other drivers have crashes
How do we change driver behaviour?
Enforcement, education, engineering (perceptual countermeasures)
What do we change if we can’t change behaviour?
- safer roads
- safer vehicles
- safer road users
