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?
So if some effective warning technology could be developed - which, it may hurt our pride to say so, but this is probably the easy bit - here's some possible ways people would be persuaded to install it and have it switched on:
- Lower insurance premiums if a warning device without an off switch was installed.
- Companies mandating it on their fleet vehicles (in connection with the point above) which would get drivers used to it.
- Effective sales and marketing by those car companies that see safety as a selling point - they're really good at this stuff, sadly I suspect car manufacturers' marketing departments probably have a much bigger HF department than their safety teams and far, far bigger than, say, ORR!!
- Errr...any other ideas? (Ok, this isn't really our field.) With seat belts we had a massive public information exercise, I can't see that happening today because again it would be seen as "nanny state". (Ok, we had it with covid, but that was a much higher risk, and besides which we're now seeing that advice being ignored by the same groups for all the same reasons...)
And actually this is a question that goes far beyond just this case. We can develop the most wonderful life saving technology possible, but if people decide to believe that they are better at managing risk than the technology is - to justify the fact that they don't like being restricted by what the technology is allowing them to do - how do we combat that? And note that part of this is that sometimes they may have a point, our risk assessment during the technology development may have got it "wrong" - in quotes because acceptance of risk often doesn't have a cut and dried answer.
So if some effective warning technology could be developed - which, it may hurt our pride to say so, but this is probably the easy bit - here's some possible ways people would be persuaded to install it and have it switched on:
- Lower insurance premiums if a warning device without an off switch was installed.
- Companies mandating it on their fleet vehicles (in connection with the point above) which would get drivers used to it.
- Effective sales and marketing by those car companies that see safety as a selling point - they're really good at this stuff, sadly I suspect car manufacturers' marketing departments probably have a much bigger HF department than their safety teams and far, far bigger than, say, ORR!!
- Errr...any other ideas? (Ok, this isn't really our field.) With seat belts we had a massive public information exercise, I can't see that happening today because again it would be seen as "nanny state". (Ok, we had it with covid, but that was a much higher risk, and besides which we're now seeing that advice being ignored by the same groups for all the same reasons...)
And actually this is a question that goes far beyond just this case. We can develop the most wonderful life saving technology possible, but if people decide to believe that they are better at managing risk than the technology is - to justify the fact that they don't like being restricted by what the technology is allowing them to do - how do we combat that? And note that part of this is that sometimes they may have a point, our risk assessment during the technology development may have got it "wrong" - in quotes because acceptance of risk often doesn't have a cut and dried answer.
