How good are you at driving?
Be honest—how good are your driving skills really?
Peoples’ sense of their own driving ability is deeply embedded. Most will tell you that they are ‘above average’. Even if you tell them that, of course, they can’t all be above average, they’ll say “yeah, but I am above average”.
This is relevant if you are trying to design systems to help people to drive better, and more safely. If you ask a person to describe her actions while, for example, merging from a smaller road onto a big one, she will probably describe a standard ‘textbook’ manoeuvre. She won’t tell you what happens when the phone rings, when she is distracted by her children in the back, when she is late for work, tired, or gripped by road rage. For the more experienced drivers, many driving behaviours have become habitual and automatic, so people aren’t really aware of what they are doing or thinking while driving. And the way we ask questions about driving doesn’t help. We tend to ask about driving behaviour as if everyone is always rational and we fail to take account of the social and emotional factors that influence what we do.
This was the problem facing the team at Innovia Technology when they were designing novel systems to improve safety on the road. So, how did the team face these challenges? The narrative below summarises some of their thinking and processes.
Glenn arrived at the meeting late. “Sorry, the traffic is always terrible when it’s been raining. There was a collision. People just don’t realise they need to change their driving behaviour when the conditions change.”
“You should know,” Marie, the psychologist, commented. “You’re the transport designer! Anyway, you’ve arrived at just the right moment—we’re talking about the solutions to prevent road accidents for The Ray.”
The Ray is a not-for-profit organisation that manages 18 miles of highway in Georgia that is working to make roads greener and safer. Its mission is ‘Zero Carbon, Zero Waste, Zero Death’. The Ray developed as a result of an epiphany by the founder of Interface, Inc, Ray C. Anderson. He had grown the business into the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpets, but realised that his company, and all of business and industry, was causing tremendous environmental damage. Furthermore, he recognised that only businesses like his were sufficiently large, capitalised, and organised to solve global environmental challenges. In 1994, he committed to making his organisation sustainable, so that it could eventually operate with no harm to the biosphere. For the remaining 17 years of his life, he proved that a company’s authentic commitment to environmental sustainability was not only morally right: it was also remarkably profitable. Today, The Ray describes itself as ‘a living lab for innovative ideas and technologies that can set a new standard for roadways around the world and prove that ambitious goals are within our reach’.
This meeting at Innovia was focused on how to improve driving safety.
Marie had been sifting through piles of statistics and reports on driving behaviour. “Did you know that 95% of accidents are caused by drivers themselves and 40% are rear-end collisions? Most crashes occur because people don’t pay attention to the road—they look but they don’t see, or they only see what they expect to see.”
The client relationship manager, Andy, who was a physicist, had been looking at all the solutions that had been tried previously. “There are so many ways of approaching this problem—signage, traffic calming, vehicle tracking, and more. And there’s so much data! How do we know where to focus?”
“Signs and signals don’t always help,” said Marie. “Only about 15% of people’s attention is given to road signs. If you show people ten signs while driving, they only recall seeing one of them! And when you increase the number of signs, you actually lull people into a false sense of security, so they pay even less attention”
“So, where should we focus?” asked Glenn.
“I’ve been looking at the psychology of driving behaviour,” said Marie. “There are several behavioural models we could use to understand the way in which drivers do, (or don’t) make good decisions. I think the most useful one here would be the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Let’s start with this. We might need to modify as we get new data, but it will help us to decide what is important initially.”
Over the next few weeks, the team investigated the types of accidents that were happening, explored why they were happening, and analysed the psychology of drivers. The behavioural model helped the group to identify effective ways to change driving behaviour.
A few weeks later, the team was reviewing the findings.
Marie started the conversation. “The key to increasing safety is to keep people alert. If they have too little to do, they don’t pay attention. Most drivers think they are better than average—they don’t like to be told what to do even if it is for their own good. Anything we create needs to fit with the driver’s own view of the situation, otherwise drivers won’t accept it.”.
“Different drivers make mistakes for different reasons—some are overconfident, some are nervous. We need to address all of these reasons,” Andy added.
Glenn agreed. “We’ve looked at lots of different ideas and have come up with a range of possible solutions. The strongest idea has never been done before, but it fits the behavioural model well and looks technically very promising. It involves using solar-powered LED road studs to give subtle cues to the driver to help them drive more safely. I think this is a really powerful option.”
And he was right. The team developed a range of ways in which the solar-powered s...