Reducing newly-qualified driver crash risk: Identifying behavioural targets

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Road traffic crashes pose a major public health challenge. During 2013 crashes claimed 1713 UK lives and seriously injured 21657. This is an unacceptable human tragedy and also cost the economy £14.7 billion. Novice drivers have higher crash risk than any other group of drivers. Crash rates are highest immediately after the licence is obtained and decreases quickly over the first few months of driving. When people hear these statistics they usually attribute this effect to "experience". This is correct; we can be confident that this safety improvement does result from driving experience. However, we do not know how driving behaviour changes as result of experience; we do not know what it is that more experienced drivers do differently from very new drivers. If we can work out what experienced drivers are doing differently then we can support new drivers to adopt the same behaviours from the start of their driving careers. This support might take the form of training, testing, in-vehicle technology and legislation. In order to identify how behaviour changes over the early stages of driving, we will repeatedly interview a sample of new drivers over the first 3 months of their driving careers. We will focus on four situations in which new drivers are particularly vulnerable to crashes: (1) turning right across a traffic flow, (2) loss-of control on curves, (3) situations risking rear-end shunts and (4) driving at night. We will use these results to design a new questionnaire to measure the behaviours that change over the first few months of driving. We will then conduct a large scale study of new drivers to refine our questionnaire and test whether it measures the driving behaviours that underlie the road safety improvements during the early months of driving. Evidence that safer scores on our measure are more common in experienced drivers and predict lower crash involvement would be supportive of its effectiveness.The results of this study can inform policy and practice aimed at reducing risky behaviour associated with elevated crash risk in novice drivers. The behaviours identified as underlying the safety improvement in the first few months of driving can be targeted in driver training to try to improve novice drivers' road safety from day one. Our measure may be used in evaluations of whether training packages are effective in this regard. Our work could also inform revisions to the driving test to facilitate only giving licencing drivers who have reached a certain level in the behaviours identified. More broadly, the project will contribute to understanding the behaviours that put novice drivers at increased crash risk. Our results will inform policy decisions regarding legislation to protect young drivers from crash. For example there is mounting pressure to introduce a Graduated Licensing Scheme in the UK to prohibit novice drivers from the riskiest driving behaviours during their first year of driving. Our work can inform this debate by indicating which behaviours are most important to prohibit. Our results can also inform the design of in-car driver support technologies to aid novice drivers in the most safety-relevant aspects of driving. In these ways we believe our project can support more effective public health interventions to reduce crash involvement among novice drivers in the future.