TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY TODAY - Springer978-1-4757-6867-1/1.pdf · and practice of traffic psychology...

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TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

Transcript of TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY TODAY - Springer978-1-4757-6867-1/1.pdf · and practice of traffic psychology...

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TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

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TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

edited by

Pierre-Emmanuel Barjonet European Association of Transport Psychologists

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC

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ISBN 978-1-4419-4909-7 ISBN 978-1-4757-6867-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-6867-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Copyright ~ 2001 by Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo­copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Printed on acid-free paper.

The Publisher offers discounts on this book for course use and bulk purchases. For further information, send email to<[email protected]> .

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List of Contributors

Foreword P.-E. Barjonet

Preface y. Brown

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE: GENERAL OVERVIEW

1. Objectives, Topics and Methods

VB

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T. Rothengatter 3

2. Transport Psychology in Europe: A Historical Approach P.-E. Barjonet, F. Tortosa 13

3. Models in Traffic Psychology R.D. Huguenin, K. Rumar 31

PART TWO: MIND AND BEHAVIOR IN TRAFFIC

4. Perception V.E. Cavallo, A.S. Cohen 63

5. Factors Influencing Driving Performance M. Vallet 91

6. Learning to Drive R. Fuller 105

7. Attitudes L. Aberg 119

8. Motivational and Emotional Aspects Involved in Driving R. Bafiuls, L. Montoro 13 7

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PART THREE: CHANGING DRIVING COGNITIONS, ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

9. Driver Improvement G. Kroj, E. Dienes 165

10. The Effects of Safety Regulations and Law Enforcement S. Siegrist, E. Roskova 181

11. Effectiveness of Road Safety Campaigns N. De Vrieze 207

12. Social Intervention in Traffic Safety EJ. Carbonell 219

13. The Effects of Road Design on Driving J. Theeuwes 241

14. The Effect of Road Transport Telematics L. Nilsson, L. Harms, B. Peters 265

15. Users' Acceptance and Societal Acceptability of New Traffic Technologies

S. Petica 287

PART FOUR: TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGY IN PRACTICE: SOME SELECTED EXAMPLES

16. Driver Selection I. Schanz-Lorenz 325

17. The Traffic Psychological Job in the German-Language Area

w. Schneider, B. Bukasa 343

Conclusion. Traffic Psychology for the 2000's: Profession and Science H. Summala 353

Index 365

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ABERG, Lars, Dalarna University, Sweden

BANULS, Rosa, University of Valencia, Traffic Research Institute, Spain

BARJONET, Pierre-Emmanuel, European Association of Transport Psychologists, France

BUKASA, Birgit, KN, Intitute for Traffic Safety Research, Austria

CARBONELL, Enrique J., University of Valencia, Traffic Research Institute, Spain

CA VALLO, Viola E., INRETS, Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Conduite, Arcueil, France

COHEN, Amos S., Universitat ZUrich, Psychologisches Institut, ZUrich, Switzerland

DE VRIEZE, Nicole, Psychologist, (IBSR) Belgian Road Safety Institute, Belgium

DIENES, Elizabeth, Hungarian Coordination Council for Work Psychology, Hungary

FULLER, Ray, Department of Psychology, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

HARMS, Lisbeth, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI), Sweden

HUGUENIN, Raphael D., Swiss Council for Accident Prevention, bfu, Berne, Switzerland

KROJ, GUnter, BASt, Federal Highway Research Institute, Germany

MONTORO, Luis, University of Valencia, Traffic Research Institute, Spain

NILSSON, Lena, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI), Sweden

PETERS, Bjorn Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI), Sweden

PETleA, Stefan, National Institute for Transport and Safety Research (INRETS), France

ROSKOV A, Eva, Comenius University, Slovakia, Bratislava

ROTHENGATTER, Talib, Center for Environmental and Traffic Psychology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

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RUMAR, Kare, Swedish Road and Transport Research Institute VTI, Linkoping, Sweden

SCHANZ-LORENZ, Iris, Psychologist, Stuttgart, Germany

SCHNEIDER, Walter, KN, Intitute for Traffic Safety Research, Austria

SIEGRIST, Stefan, Swiss Council for Accident Prevention, bfu, Berne, Switzerland

SUMMALA, Heikki, Department of Psychology, Traffic Research Unit, University of Helsinki, Finland

THEEUWES, Jan, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherland

TORTOSA, Francisco, INTRAS, Institute for Traffic Safety Research, Spain

VALLET, Michel, INRETS, National Institute for Transport and Safety Research, France

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FOREWORD

Pierre-Emmanuel Barjonet Editor European Association o/Transport Psychologists Chairman Paris, April 2001

The moving of people and the carriage of goods are basic activities in our societies. More than ever, mobility is a need. The acceleration of mobility generates a traffic in constant progression in the sky and on the seas, the roads and the railways.

As we know, mobility and traffic generate economic value and social well-being; they also have harmful consequences on the health, the existence and the destiny of people as on the natural environment. Reducing harmful effects of traffic and preserving its advantages requires serious control and organization. A key element of regulation is the "human factor." Among social sciences, psychology is, essentially, the instrument of knowledge of the "human factor," and, more precisely, of man in action; this is why, since the beginning of 20th century, psychology was brought to study drivers abilities and mental structures. Today, this applied branch of psychology is arrived to maturity. It has provided and continues to provide scientific knowledge in the fields of perception, cognition, emotion, attitudes, learning related to drivers and also provide assistance to public administrations, companies and people with regard to drivers' education, communication, diagnosis and therapy.

However, psychologists do not replace public authorities which remain judges of the effective application of the results of psychology; yet we could imagine that with a little more psychology, traffic would be improved considerably, in particular on the side of road insecurity which level and human cost remain, in many country, unbearably high.

This work presents a photography of the state of traffic psychology at the whole beginning of the century. It is intended to researchers, students and for all those who want to really understand what is psychology of man or woman at the wheel or the commands of a haulage machine. The principal fields of traffic psychology such that they exist in the research institutes and universities, were covered. Their drafting was entrusted to academics and

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researchers of great experiment which expose in a clear way problems, methods, assumptions and results of the fields they know best.

The work is introduced and concluded by two major figures of our discipline: Y. Brown and H. Summala, who guarantee, to some extent, the excellence of the delivery. All the authors, often very busy with their activities of teaching and research, provided a particular effort for the achievement of this work; the Kluwer editions constantly helped and encouraged us; the readers and correctors faced the worst by correcting our texts; all are acknowledged for confidence that they granted to us.

Lastly, this work is published on the initiative of the European Association of Psychology Applied to Transport (EUROPSYT). One of the aim of EUROPSYT is to promote the psychology of transport; the publication of this book was one of its major objectives. The structure of the work, the choice of the authors, and the dynamics necessary to the achievement of work return to the executive committee and the board of directors ofEUROPSYT. Many thanks for all.

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PREFACE

Ivan Brown

Including the word "Today" in the title of a textbook risks built-in obsolescence, because today is tomorrow's yesterday. However, the risk seems worth taking with the present book, because the approaches to theory and practice of traffic psychology today are very different from those of a decade or two ago, yet they seem likely to remain of importance and interest for some considerable time to come. This book is also of importance because it represents the collected views and experiences of experts in the field, who have, until very recently, had no journal dedicated solely to their subject, with the result that potential readers of their publications have had to search a wide variety of journals specializing in traffic engineering, ergonomics, human factors, accident prevention, psychology, or medicine.

It is not difficult to understand why research publications in traffic and transport psychology have been so dispersed for so long. As motorized transport became more and more affordable, and accident rates increased, it seemed logical to attribute the resulting carnage to human error because the technological parts of transport systems were considered the best that could be devised at that time. Hence concern centered on individual differences in competence in vehicle control. Within public transport systems, psychophysics became the standard approach to the selection of individuals with apparently appropriate levels of perceptual-motor skill. Transport psychologists concentrated on the development of objective tests of vehicle control usage, of attentional distribution and of judgments of speed and distance. While sufficing for the selection and subsequent intensive training of professional drivers and pilots, such tests were clearly inappropriate for the assessment of skills among the rapidly increasing numbers of private motorists, whose competence continued to be tested subjectively by non­psychologist driving examiners and who often received no professional instruction at all prior to being awarded a license to drive.

Increasing road traffic density and associated casualty rates, plus the collection of official accident statistics, focused attention on individual differences in accident involvement. Statisticians became interested in the concept of "accident proneness," which attributed safety problems to a minority of individuals who were regularly over-involved in crashes. Road

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safety thus became simply a matter of identifYing these individuals and preventing them from driving. Although psychologists were associated with this analytic approach to accident reduction, it is not clear that there was any attempt to "explain" accident proneness in psychological terms and the issue came to be regarded as a blind alley in safety research.

The development of ergonomics by psychologists during World War II transferred attention to the interaction between human operators and increasingly sophisticated technological systems. Designing such systems to match the performance limits of ordinary individuals was seen as a much more rational approach to the development of technology that could be used more efficiently than was the design of systems which paid little regard to human variability. This approach paid off for some twenty years or so, until "at-the-scene" studies revealed human error to be a direct contributory factor in the majority of road accidents, rather than simply contributing to problems at the interfaces with vehicles and roads. Clearly there was an urgent need to understand the nature and sources of these errors. At the same time, it was recognized that, although much remained to be done by way of improving secondary safety in vehicle accidents (injury prevention and reduction), further advances in road safety required a greater concentration on primary safety, the prevention and reduction of accidents by directing countermeasures at the undesirable attitudes, behavior and skills of certain road users, particularly new drivers.

It is not necessary to be a psychologist to recognize the many dichotomies among driver characteristics .. Road users may readily be categorized as young or old, as skilled or unskilled, as experienced or inexperienced, as driving for commercial reasons or for leisure purposes, as familiar with their traffic environment or unfamiliar with it, and so on. It is not necessary to be a traffic expert to recognize that these individual differences are quite likely to be associated with differences in accident liability. Any layperson could also surmise that homogeneity in traffic behavior equates to safety, because behavioral variety is likely to provoke misunderstandings, conflicts and collisions. However, only the psychologist has the expertise to explore and understand these differences in accident liability validly and advises soundly on the design of accident countermeasures. Even that expertise has been limited by a lack of theory in traffic psychology. As Huguenin and Rumar point out, the cognitive theories, which have been adopted from mainstream psychology perhaps, fall short in terms of their emotional and social psychological aspects.

A persistent problem with the cognitive approach to transport safety research has been the development of methodology to examine the covert processes in driving. While overt behavior is obviously observable and thus potentially measurable, environmental inputs to the driver's information processing are usually obscure. On-road research suffers from the disadvantage that traffic conditions can seldom be repeated precisely from

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one trial to the next, while simulator studies are limited by restricted visual displays and the absence of injury risk to the "driver." Yet vision is the principal channel for the uptake of traffic and environmental information and perception is the essential component of drivers' cognitive interactions with their task demands. The importance of visual perception as an active and constructive process has been well demonstrated by Cavallo and Cohen's discussion of the value of drivers' perception of speed and distance and of "time-to-collision" in establishing personal safety margins on the road. These authors also emphasize the importance of "perceptual learning" among new drivers, which explains the current interest in hazard perception as an essential skill for safe driving. As Fuller points out, learners have little opportunity to practice this skill during the limited period they spend in professional training.

Relatively little attention is also given during driver training to the inculcation of appropriate attitudes towards the task and towards the behavior of fellow road users. Recent contributions to this field from theories of Reasoned Action and Planned Behavior are presented by Aberg and West.

Increasing traffic density throughout the world inevitably leads to an increasing number of conflicts between road users and frequently to an upsurge in emotional responding; often resulting in what the media have termed "road rage." In addition, anxiety will often be experienced by novice drivers and the elderly, as they contrast their perceived undeveloped or declining skills with those of the "average" motorist they see around them. Furthermore, drivers will occasionally (perhaps frequently) feel stressed in traffic because of personal or task-related reasons. All these potentially distracting emotional factors have adverse implications for road safety, in ways discussed by Banuls and Montoro. A variety of other, perhaps more understandable factors influencing driver behavior, receive comment by Vallet.

Changing the attitudes and behavior of qualified and experienced drivers who break traffic regulations is as important as inculcating these characteristics among new drivers. Kroj and Dienes discuss certain professional approaches to driving improvement among offenders and consider some of the difficulties in this field. A similar psychological assessment of drivers in the German traffic system is later presented by Lorenz and also by Schneider and Bukasa. Siegrist and Roscova consider ways in which safety regulations and law enforcement influence traffic behavior. Research has categorized unwanted behavior into errors, mistakes, lapses and violations. The latter are outstandingly associated with road accidents and these authors give particular attention to the causes, types and prevention of such unsafe behavior.

De Vrieze considers the effectiveness of road safety campaigns; usually a difficult exercise, as their effects are often impossible to distinguish from

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the influences of other ongoing safety measures. However, the evaluation of such measures is usually considered cost-effective, given the high cost of road accidents. Carbonell pursues this issue of social interventions in traffic safety, arguing for a "cultural transformation" which "diminishes the tolerance of infractions and reckless driving behavior." Clearly this approach will never be 100% effective and there is room for an alternative method of mediating undesirable behavior by appropriate design of the road system, as is discussed by Theeuwes. Yet another alternative way of homogenizing the behavior of individual drivers and thus reducing conflicts and accidents is provided by research and development over the past decade in the field of Road Transport Telematics. In theory, such on-road and in-vehicle driver support systems could relieve individuals of many sub-tasks where their skills are found wanting. Nilsson, Harms and Peters suggest that the introduction of telematics systems "[ ... ] may tum out to be the greatest and most comprehensive transformation of road transportation since the invention of the combustion engine!" Certainly the DRIVE program brought together European traffic psychologists and obliged them to work with representatives from traffic engineering and vehicle manufacturing, which perhaps broadened everyone's knowledge and understanding of certain practical interface issues between people, vehicles and roads. But it also focused attention on cognitive problems at these interfaces, because the psychologists concerned appreciated that it was in these areas that drivers particularly needed support. Nilsson et at. point out that task allocation between driver and technology is a crucial aspect of system efficiency, but the acceptability of these new systems at both the individual and societal levels is also crucial to their impact on road safety; an issue elaborated by Petica.

In summary, this book provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the more important issues confronting traffic psychologists today and it will be of interest to anyone considering research or practice in this difficult area of transport safety. Parts of it may even persuade reluctant vehicle designers and highway engineers that individual differences in attitudes, behavior and skills among drivers do not inevitably present insoluble problems that are best ignored! This is certainly not a "cook-book" aimed at presenting ready­made solutions to traffic problems, but it does provide a variety of recipes by which many current problems in traffic psychology might satisfactorily be resolved or ameliorated.