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?
That means if it takes you one second to respond to danger and apply your brakes, you'll need to add 88 feet to the above number for stopping distance (180 kinetic energy requirements + 88 meters response time = 268 meters). It's about kinetics.
Benyamin - I think Rob's point is that you are continuing to confuse feet with metres.
I am pleased that my attempt to return this thread to the original topic has renewed interest, but we are still off topic. 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. There is simply no need to go into intense theory of kinetic energy, or the like. As Rob says, we know what kinetic energy is but it is not relevant to this discussion.
Notwithstanding that, it looks as though I am going to need to justify some points about coefficient of friction, a much more relevant point to this topic. Watch this space.
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.
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.
