Voluntary risk taking and skill deficits in young driver accidents in the UK

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Abstract

In absolute terms, young drivers have three to four times as many accidents per year as older drivers; and even allowing for their relative numbers in the population, their accident involvement is about 2.5 times higher than older drivers.

A sample of 3437 accident reports was considered, including 1296 in detail, from midland police forces in the UK, involving drivers aged 17–25, and covering the years 1994–1996 inclusive. Four types of accident were identified as being of particular concern due to their high frequency: ‘cross-flow’-turns; rear-end shunts; loss of control on bends; and accidents in darkness. (The term ‘cross-flow’ is used in relation to turns to denote an intersection accident where a driver is turning across the path of oncoming traffic, i.e., left turns in the US and continental Europe, but right turns in the UK and other countries where driving on the left side of the road is the norm.)

An examination of driver risk taking behaviours as revealed in police interviews gave an insight into some of the motivational factors underlying young driver behaviour. Young driver accidents of all types are found to be frequently the result of ‘risk taking’ factors as opposed to ‘skill deficit’ factors. It had previously been thought that one of the main problems that young drivers have is in the area of specific skills needed in the driving task. However, it appears that a large percentage of their accidents are purely the result of two or three failures resulting from voluntary risk taking behaviour, rather than skill deficits per se. It is shown that specific groups of young drivers can even be considered as above average in driving skills, but simultaneously have a higher accident involvement due to their voluntary decisions to take risks.

Introduction

Road accidents are the most common cause of death among those aged under 25 in the USA, Canada and the European Union. Forsyth (1992) quotes figures from the UK in 1987 that show male drivers between the ages of 17 (the minimum age of licensure in the UK) and 20 having an average of 440 injury accidents per 100 million km driven. The average for all male drivers was 106 injury accidents. Comparable figures for female drivers in this age bracket were 240 versus 125 injury accidents per 100 million km driven. Everett et al. (2001) examined national trends in transportation related injury risk and safety behaviours among US high school students, and found that many young people place themselves at unnecessary risk from motor vehicle and bicycle related crash injuries and fatalities because of drink driving and improper use of safety equipment such as seatbelts.

Accident rates appear to drop rapidly above the 17–20 age bracket. Figures for male drivers in the age range 20–24 years, for example, show a drop to 180 injury accidents per 100 million km driven. While this is a massive drop, it still represents an injury accident rate that is nearly 70% higher than the baseline for all male drivers.

The focus of this study was on four main problem areas in young driver accident involvement: intersection turn accidents; accidents on bends/curves; rear-end shunt type accidents and accidents occurring during the hours of darkness. Certain contributory factors are known to be common in all young driver accidents, and one of these, speeding, is discussed here first followed by a summary of research on the four types of accidents to be examined, and a brief overview of research methodology.

Younger drivers have long been associated with offences and a variety of accident types involving speeding. Nationally gathered ‘STATS19’ data (covering all recorded UK injury accidents) for 1995 shows that the importance of speeding as a contributory factor in injury accidents declines steadily with age.

Speeding was by far the most common offence for young male and female drivers in the UK Cohort study by Forsyth et al. (1995) and there also appeared to be an increase in the number of speeding violations as a whole over the first three years of driving. Forsyth et al. suggest that this is a result of increasing driver confidence as initial driving experience is gained after passing the test.

Corbett (2003) has noted that young male drivers seem particularly motivated to commit speeding offences by intrinsic enjoyment of fast driving. The work of both Parker (1991) and Tuohy and Stradling (1992) showed the importance of such internal motivational factors in an understanding of the young driver problem. Parker (1991) found that speeding in younger drivers was often also mediated by the effects of peer groups and significant others, resulting in the young driver having a perceived lack of control over violations such as speeding. Similarly, Tuohy and Stradling (1992) surveyed the knowledge and beliefs of both young drivers and ‘pre-drivers’, and concluded that both groups had a good knowledge of basic roadcraft: Young drivers knew what was the correct behaviour, but attitudes, opinions and beliefs usually stopped them practising it.

It has been suggested, e.g. by Brown (1982), that one of the reasons young drivers attach less importance to the risk of speeding is they are overconfident in their control and recovery skills. Brown concludes that “… relatively naive drivers tend to create accident opportunities for themselves because they often overestimate their ability to recover from error”. It has also been pointed out by Deery (1999) that psychological research separate from the road safety area suggests that people are generally overconfident about their skilled performance, and that in addition, speeding can result from young males especially having a higher degree of risk acceptance while driving than that found in older drivers.

A large US study by Treat et al. (1979) that involved over 400 in-depth analyses revealed the hitherto unappreciated role of visual search at intersections. In a UK study, Clarke et al. (1998) discovered that young drivers (under the age of 25) were more than three times more likely to be involved in right turning accidents (either onto or off a more major road) than typical mileage travelled each year by this age group would lead one to expect (note that a right turn in the UK, where road-users drive on the left, is equivalent to a left turn in the US and most other countries).

Research on intersection accidents has often focussed on ‘looked but failed to see’ accidents, e.g. Brown (2002), who suggested a number of psychological factors that could contribute towards such errors. Similarly, perception experiments by Mack and Rock (1998) have shown that subjects may be less likely to perceive an object if they are looking at it directly than if it falls outside the centre of the visual field, a phenomenon which they call ‘inattentional blindness’.

When the type of manoeuvre in UK aggregate national records is examined, it can be seen that younger drivers (17–19) are involved in twice the proportion of accidents while negotiating a bend that older drivers are (in this example, those aged 30–39). This is a feature associated with the over-representation of younger drivers in single vehicle accidents (as shown by Maycock, 1991).

Rear-end shunts, where a vehicle runs into a slower or stationary vehicle ahead, have been found to be amongst the most common type of accidents for all drivers. West and French (1993) estimated that at least 30% of all accidents on UK roads were shunts. While many of these accidents are seemingly trivial, whiplash injuries that can result from them are a significant problem. Treat et al.'s (1979) study showed that forms of inattention in car following were prime contributors to such accidents.

Accidents for all drivers per unit distance travelled are much higher during the hours of darkness than during the daylight. It is possible that the problem of increased young driver accident involvement during the hours of darkness is caused by the purposes for which young drivers are on the road during these hours. These include driving for social purposes and ‘driving for pleasure’, both of which younger drivers do more than other groups of drivers (Stradling and Meadows, 2000). Driving is viewed as an expressive activity by many young drivers, and is often a significant leisure activity for many.

The causality of real road accidents can be a difficult phenomenon to study. One possible solution to this is the use of methodology that investigates road accidents after they have occurred, rather than the more familiar psychological research that relies for its method on examination of driver behaviour in a controlled environment. Many studies have used in-depth techniques applied to secondary data sources such as police reports, interviews and questionnaires, e.g. Malaterre (1990), who showed that precise analysis can be carried out by referring to complete police accident reports, with all their varieties of information.

Case study methods were used by Clarke et al. (1998) in a study of overtaking (‘passing’) accidents and placed an emphasis on the interpretation of causal patterns by the human coders, and used the powers of a computer database for later stages of analysis. It was found that such an approach was particularly suited to revealing drivers’risk taking behaviours (primarily in interviews and witness statements), as well as skill failures in accident involved drivers. It was hoped in the current study that this method would be able to examine and quantify the differing contributions to the causation of the four types of young driver accident made by these essentially very different groups of factors.

Section snippets

Method

Our method relies on the human interpretation of road accident case reports. A pilot sample of 100 cases was drawn from two local police jurisdictions. This sample identified common accident scenarios that could be studied further—the four accident types of ‘cross-flow’ intersection turns, accidents on rural bends/curves, rear-end shunt accidents, and accidents occurring during the hours of darkness. These were also identified as areas of concern by the government transport agency (DTLR) that

Voluntary risk taking versus skill deficits

An investigation was attempted of the division between contributory factors in accidents that were primarily about drivers’risk taking behaviour, and those that were apparently concerned with skill deficits. In the case of voluntary risk deficits, accidents were deemed to be caused by behaviours which could be changed at will, if the driver chose to do so or was sufficiently concerned or conscientious about that aspect of the driving task. In the case of ‘skill’ deficits, the accident outcome

Conclusion

It seems the central difference is between accidents that are caused by voluntary risk taking factors, rather than skill deficits. In particular sub-groups of young drivers, e.g. drivers of performance cars, this difference is especially marked. Such drivers have, if anything, higher than average control skills, but this is more than offset by their risk taking decisions.

Accidents in the dark might be expected to arise from problems of visibility. We find this not to be generally true. The

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Transport Research Laboratory, Crowthorne, England, UK, and this paper is abridged with permission from the final project report TRL 542 “In-depth Accident Causation Study of Young Drivers”. We are most grateful to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Police for their patient assistance in locating suitable cases for analysis; to members of Nottinghamshire County Council Accident Investigation Unit for assistance with the selection of the sample; and to Geoff Maycock of

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