 Home > Auto > Accidents > Driver Behavior
Ever since Buchanan's Traffic in Towns report of 1963, urban and suburban street design has for many years had the aim of improving traffic flow, by trying to separate vehicles from pedestrians and make the driver's job easier. As traffic levels have increased, accompanied by more interventions by planners and road safety teams, accident levels have reduced but not as much as was hoped. This difference is generally attributed to road users' attitudes and behaviors.
Accompanying the changes to road designs has been a wide-scale adoption of rules of the road alongside law enforcement policies that have included drink-driving laws, widespread setting of speed limits, speed enforcement systems such as speed cameras, all with the intention of averting or reducing the severity of collisions. Some countries' driving tests have been expanded to test a new driver's behavior during emergencies and hazard perception. However, in spite of training, there are still demographic differences in accident rates. So, for example, although young people tend to have good reaction speeds, disproportionately more young male drivers feature in accidents, with researchers observing that many exhibit behaviors and attitudes to risk that can place them in more hazardous situations than other road users. This gets reflected by actuaries when they set insurance rates for different age groups, partly based on their age, sex, and choice of vehicle.
Attempts to impose traffic policies can be complicated by local circumstances and driver behavior. In 1969 Leeming warned that there is a balance to be struck when "improving" the safety of a road:
It can safely be said that places which look dangerous do not have accidents, or very few. They happen at places which do not look dangerous. The reason for this is simple. The motorist is as intelligent as the 'local people'. If a place looks dangerous, he can see that it is, so he takes care and there are no accidents. He does not want to have an accident, and he will take care at obviously dangerous places. Accidents happen when there is some trap in road conditions which is not obvious at a glance, or where the conditions are too complicated for the limited human machine to deal with in the short time available. The driver has only a fraction of a second to size up a situation, and there may be some trap which he cannot see in this short time.'
|