Last week we looked at how young drivers are much more likely to be injured or killed in a road crash, and the factors that are responsible for that. This week we move onto to reducing those crash risks by changing young drivers.
Changing Young Drivers
"The development of driving skill occurs through training" |
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Driving skill can be defined as "the cognitive and psychomotor ability to operate and physically manoeuvre a vehicle". Skill is defined as the ability to carry out the basic task of manoeuvring a vehicle automatically, that is, without having to pay close attention to each step in the task. In a complex task like driving, it is important to develop skill in the basic operation of the vehicle, as this makes available attention to other aspects of the driving task - like taking into account the terrain or the traffic conditions.
If young drivers have not developed the basic skill of vehicle operation to the extent that it requires minimal attention resources, they will be more vulnerable to crashes as they do not have sufficient attention to pay to other important aspects of the driving task.
Skill and experience can be developed through appropriate training and education, whereas factors like age, gender and characteristic ways of behaving cannot be changed. When looking for targets for reducing young driver crash risk, therefore, skill and experience must be among the first to be considered.
The development of driving skill occurs through training. Training in this context refers to learning of the specific methods and techniques of driving and operating a vehicle. This occurs through graded exposure to the task of driving so that the novice learns the actions needed to make the vehicle move in the direction and speed they want it to and to make adjustments to the requirements of the road. Driving skill is defined in this context as being achieved when the novice is able to control the vehicle including the steering, speed and gears consistently without error.
Driving Skill and Training
The skill of driving is a complex set of behaviours that requires integration of a broad range of information processing functions. In order to perform, the vehicle driver requires the ability to perceive the important parts of the visual field and respond to them appropriately. It requires motor skills and psychomotor coordination. It requires the ability to attend to the important parts of the visual scene and to do so, often for very long periods and often in environments that are very unstimulating and monotonous. It also requires memory capacity, but only to a certain extent.
To develop the skill of driving means the development of these processing functions into a smooth effortless sequence of behaviour. Skill is developed through repetition and rehearsal so that these information processing functions become automated and require little attention and effort to perform.
The development of skill occurs through driver training and to a lesser extent driving experience. The training process requires time and repetition, especially so for a complex task like driving. Driving skill develops mainly through directed training. Simple experience with the performance of driving may not result in the development of real skill as the novice driver may learn to do the task of driving but use inadequate or inappropriate methods to produce the performance. For example, a driver with little training may be able to produce apparently satisfactory driving behaviour, but might use poor methods, such as not checking the rear view mirror very often or taking both hands off the steering wheel in order to change gears and signal when about to negotiate a corner.
"It's not clear what constitutes sufficient skill to function safely on the road" |
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There will be little disagreement that driving skill is the fundamental attribute for all drivers and for driver safety. The problem arises, however, because it is not clear what constitutes sufficient skill to function adequately and more importantly, function safely on the road. Simply being able to operate the vehicle smoothly, and at least partially automatically, may not be enough. Since driving is such a complex task with many dynamic components, sufficient skill to be safe on the road probably requires that a considerable amount of the task has become automated. For example it is probably not sufficient to simply be able to complete all the processes required to move a vehicle through a left hand corner safely. Sufficient skill probably requires the new driver to be able to do so with traffic coming from their right, pedestrians on their left, at night and in the rain. A skilled driver needs to be able to complete this task with a minimum of effort and with no errors. The problem is that many new drivers on the road have not developed their driving skills to this level.
Two of the most striking characteristics of young driver crashes are first, that they are more often single vehicle crashes and second, that they occur most often because of the fault of the new driver, particularly in such areas as anticipating the unexpected actions of other drivers.
These two characteristics are surely due to the lack of skill of young drivers as reflected by their greater errors on-road.
- Driving Experience and Education
Another reason for the greater injury risk for young drivers is limited or inadequate on-road experience. Crash statistics provide some evidence that driver experience is a component in increased crash risk for young drivers. For example, if experience is defined as the length of time that a licence has been held, newer drivers show higher crash risk. The observation that drivers in their first year of licensing consistently show higher crash risk also suggests that experience is an important feature of increased crash risk.
In addition, simulator studies of driving performance also indicate that experienced drivers show more consistent performance than inexperienced drivers. Furthermore, the results of an evaluation of the effects of lowering the age limit for learner drivers in Sweden also demonstrated the benefits for crash risk of additional on-road driving experience. This evaluation demonstrated that adding 18 months to the period available to gain driving experience before the legal licensing age had the effect of lowering accident risk for novice drivers by 15%.
The problem with defining the role of experience in crashes is that age and experience are invariably highly correlated. Young drivers are always inexperienced and usually older drivers are more experienced. Studies that have attempted to tease apart the role of experience from the role of age and maturational factors have tended to show that age factors are much more important.
It could be expected that drivers with particular types of experience would be safer on the road through developing better skills and education which helps them learn to deal with a wider range of on-road situations. For example, a novice driver who only has experience of driving in off-peak times would be expected to be less safe in peak hour traffic than one who has experience of both off-peak and peak hour driving. One study argued that the development of vehicle control skills occurs rapidly with increasing experience but take considerably longer than one to two years, which is longer than the minimum learner driving periods set down in most licensing schemes.
On-road driver education should play a role by enriching the experience of young drivers and so increasing its impact on driver safety. Educating young drivers by providing directed experience of situations that are likely to cause them problems is likely to improve their ability to deal with them on-road.
Next week: decision making and judgement
This series comprises an edited version of a December, 1999 paper prepared by:
Ann Williamson, PhD
NSW Injury Risk Management Research Centre
University of New South Wales
http://www.irmrc.unsw.edu.au
The work was funded by the Motor Accidents Authority of NSW as part of their activity in the area of young driver safety.
The full version of the paper is available at: http://www.irmrc.unsw.edu.au/papers/drivers.pdf It includes extensive referencing of sources.
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