Accident and injury rates amongst car drivers have been consistently reducing in the United Kingdom since 1994. Indeed, the UK now has one of the lowest accident rates in the world. However, it is unclear to what extent this improvement is due to advances in car and road design and changes in legislation rather than improvements in driver behaviours.
Indeed, while rates have been reducing overall, amongst young and novice drivers they have been increasing. Driver attitudes are thought to underlie this latter trend and to constrain further improvements in the overall accident rate.
Attitudes which affect driving performance have been explicitly included in the driver competency framework which now forms the basis of the UK’s approach to driver training, assessment and licensing. As part of the development of these approaches, the Driving Standards Agency (DSA) commissioned CAS to develop and evaluate an attitude assessment questionnaire, the Attitude Advisor, primarily for use with trainee drivers but potentially with other groups of drivers as well.
The questionnaire’s design is based on Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour and a taxonomy of driver attitudes related to safety. Findings from trials of the prototype questionnaire provide support for both the underlying theory and evidence for its criterion-related validity. In particular, scores on the questionnaire are related to age, gender, accident record and driving convictions. Finally, the paper outlines options for how the Attitude Advisor may be used in the future as part of driver training and continuing personal development in the UK.
In the last fifteen years, significant improvements have been made in car accident and crash rates in the United Kingdom. The British Government set a target of a 40% reduction in road casualties by 2010 from its baseline years in the mid 1990’s. The most recent figures released by the Department for Transport (1) show that road casualties have fallen by 35% from the baseline years and so are well on the way to meeting that target.
As a result, the United Kingdom now has the fifth lowest road casualty rate in the world and only one-third that of the USA (2). This has been achieved against a backdrop of significantly increased car use, annual motor traffic mileage having increased from 274.2 billion miles (441.5 billion kilometres) to 316.4 billion miles (509.4 billion kilometres). However, the Department for Transport consider that “although the roads are safer, they are not yet as safe as they should be” (3).
There were still 247,780 road casualties in 2007. The chances of being injured in a car are twenty times greater than when travelling by rail (2). Motorcycle riding is sixteen times more dangerous again and even worse if you consider only fatalities. More importantly, although accident rates are falling for most types of car driver, rates have remained almost constant for young drivers (16 – 19 years old) and fatalities have risen by 16%.
Driving experience plays a large part in these results. There is a 40% chance of a 17 year old driver having an accident in the first six months after they have qualified to hold a full driving licence (4). Accident liability falls but still remains high for new drivers of any age. For example, 30 year olds still have an accident rate of 25% in their first six months. Much of the improvement achieved to date can be attributed to improvements in road and vehicle design and to the introduction of effective legislation and safety campaigns (3).
Concerns have been expressed that, perhaps partly as a result of road and vehicle improvements, standards of driving behaviour are declining. For example, a survey undertaken by the Canadian Automobile Association revealed that 77% of people thought that drivers were less safe now than they were 20 years ago (5). Another Canadian study (6) reported that 95.5% of drivers believe they are more distracted while driving than they were five years ago.
The Driving Standards Agency has introduced a number of initiatives in the UK aimed at bringing about the next generation of improvements. The key one is the introduction, for the first time, of an explicit competency framework, for drivers of cars and light vans (7), which sets out the standards of performance and behaviour expected of someone who holds a driving licence. A fundamental part of this framework is the identification of driving attitudes which underpin good and poor driving. It is considered that “learners often do not explore their own attitudes, or think about how they could make their behaviour safer” and that they rely too much on subjective “judgement of where their strengths and weaknesses lie” (3).
It is believed that introducing a more objective assessment of drivers’ attitudes into the training process will be an important step in making further progress towards the Government’s road safety targets. Two issues then arise: how best to assess drivers’ attitudes and how best to use the outputs of these assessments to modify or change driving behaviours.
The remainder of this paper discusses the approaches which the Driving Standards Agency is pursuing. It describes the development and initial validation of a prototype attitude assessment questionnaire, the Attitude Advisor. The Attitude Advisor is intended for use primarily with learner drivers and pre-drivers but is also being considered for use with other groups, for example, in the rehabilitation of drivers convicted of offences such as speeding and drink driving. The paper also sets out some early thoughts on how the Attitude Advisor might be introduced and used in the UK.