For safer driving, start driver training when they're very young, argues Ray Fuller
Are attitudes really that important? Is it necessary to have some control over driver behaviour? Well, imagine driving for four miles through a built-up area at an illegal 40 mph rather than 30 mph. If you hit a pedestrian you are twice as likely to kill them. And the time saved? 120 seconds.
Knowledge and skill are not enough to ensure safe behaviour on the road. What is also needed is motivation for safety. But that's not all. The road is a social environment. Just as in any other social environment, a code of acceptable behaviour applies. In our culture this usually means care, courtesy and consideration for others.
In a recent study of over 500 16-year-olds, we found that attitudes to road use were in the main safety-oriented.
Nevertheless, two consistent features emerged with direct relevance to driver safety. First, males typically demonstrated significantly less positive attitudes than females. Second, both sexes accepted breaking the speed limit where it was perceived to be safe to do so.
According to a British study of school children aged between 11 and 16, many attitudes concerning safe driving are well-formed several years prior to the age of eligibility. Risk-taking and reckless behaviour are not simply the result of the novelty of driving.
One response here has been Staying Alive, a classroom resource for Transition Year students, released by the National Safety Council in September 2001. High on its list of aims is to promote safer attitudes towards road usage prior to young people starting to learn to drive.
Another response is the Garda Road Safety Unit, recently established in the Dublin Regional Traffic Division, based at Dublin Castle. This has focused initially on the development and deployment of a hard-hitting presentation to Transition Year students, emphasising inappropriate driver behaviour and its consequences.
A third response has been the presentation in schools of a powerful drama, Never Saw the Day, an initiative of several years by the Road Safety Unit of the Dublin City Council Office of the Director of Traffic.
So attention is beginning to be paid to the early development of appropriate attitudes and values in our future drivers. But how can we be certain that drivers not only have these but translate them into better behaviour behind the wheel? Assessment of attitudes and values is no easy task because of the relative ease of "faking good".
In order to progress through the stages of graduated licensing, appropriate values and attitudes need to be consistently expressed: if the driver is to progress, no crashes or convictions must occur.
However, deliberate unsafe behaviour, including violations of rules of the road, poses a real challenge to the safety of the roadway system, and to driver education, training and assessment.
Emotions spilling over into driver decision-making can simultaneously raise driving task demand, and decrease capability. Aggressive driving may not be deliberately unsafe, but that may be its consequence. And who is not tempted to take risks when the payoff has a high value, such as making up for lost time, making that appointment, making that plane departure? On top of all this, there are individuals who emerge into late adolescence seemingly unaffected by normal socialisation processes, who exhibit little care and responsibility for others or themselves in roadway use.
To try to counter a failed socialisation process by the time the individual obtains a provisional licence is likely to be an impossible task. Thus we need to change the balance of consequences for reckless or otherwise unsafe behaviour.
High levels of enforcement are one solution. Apart from direct policing, whether human or through automatic cameras, enforcement can also work through roadway design (e.g., traffic calming measures) or electronic monitoring as employed in the Axa Traksure project.
Consequences can also be changed through reward systems coupled with advanced training and assessment, as with the Hibernian Ignition project. The ultimate intervention is to remove a lot of the decision-making from the driver altogether, as in automatic control systems such as Intelligent Speed Adaptation, currently being evaluated in Britain and elsewhere.
Although the imposition of some of these kinds of external control may sound somewhat oppressive, we should perhaps remember that the aim is to ensure compliance with safe practice, not principally to punish. And there is evidence that once behaviour changes in a particular direction, attitudes often follow suit.
• Ray Fuller is Associate Professor of Psychology at TCD