There have been many reports of motorists using the lack of traffic on the roads during the Covid19 lockdown to flout the speed limits and now with more traffic back on the roads there is a danger that some may continue to drive at excessive speeds even after things are back to ‘normal’.
Behavioural Science in transportation (understanding the behaviour and motivations of transport users such as motorists and rail commuters etc) is a fascinating subject which plays a big part in the engineering and design of roads and their ‘furniture’ in an attempt to gently persuade drivers to modify their driving behaviour to something more appropriate.
There are many such psychological tactics in place to combat speeding but could we be doing more? What other engineering solutions could be implemented to stop excessive speeding? How do different countries tackle speeding on their roads? What could we learn from them?
The original topic was the psychology of why people speed and what we can do about it. It is about education, observation, information for motorists, in simple terms that they can respond to.
Sadly the bad news is: without a different approach that doesn't work (which I suppose is the point of this thread). These all get rationalised as applying to other people - the "bad drivers", which is a problem given that (it's often said research shows) that 80% of drivers consider themselves as better drivers than average!
It might be possible that an automated vision system like the one I proposed below could work if it's seen as an aid. But since it would undoubtedly be seen as unacceptable for it to be installed without an "off" switch, the drivers you actually need to target would probably turn it off, on the grounds that they're not going to be told what to do by a "nanny" car which (in their eyes) is designed for all the bad drivers...
Apologies that's all sounding quite negative, actually I suspect that there are mergers of technology and HF design that can help with this, they're just not going to be easy - but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue them of course! There's lots of lessons to be learned from, for example, the rail industry (just picking that because it's the one I know!) where even with hand selected and carefully trained staff they still find ingenious ways of making dangerous short cuts around the technology and protective processes and - crucially - come up with wonderfully structured rationales for doing so.
The original topic was the psychology of why people speed and what we can do about it. It is about education, observation, information for motorists, in simple terms that they can respond to.
Sadly the bad news is: without a different approach that doesn't work (which I suppose is the point of this thread). These all get rationalised as applying to other people - the "bad drivers", which is a problem given that (it's often said research shows) that 80% of drivers consider themselves as better drivers than average!
It might be possible that an automated vision system like the one I proposed below could work if it's seen as an aid. But since it would undoubtedly be seen as unacceptable for it to be installed without an "off" switch, the drivers you actually need to target would probably turn it off, on the grounds that they're not going to be told what to do by a "nanny" car which (in their eyes) is designed for all the bad drivers...
Apologies that's all sounding quite negative, actually I suspect that there are mergers of technology and HF design that can help with this, they're just not going to be easy - but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue them of course! There's lots of lessons to be learned from, for example, the rail industry (just picking that because it's the one I know!) where even with hand selected and carefully trained staff they still find ingenious ways of making dangerous short cuts around the technology and protective processes and - crucially - come up with wonderfully structured rationales for doing so.
