Telling people to drive safely is an expensive waste of time and may actually cause more accidents, according to a major U.S. study
Before there were safety belts or airbags, before vehicles had crumple zones and padded interiors, before guardrails and breakaway signposts were used on highways and shoulders were cleared of roadside hazards, there were ‘Please Drive Safely’ signs.
Trying to prevent crashes by educating motorists was the almost exclusive focus of highway safety efforts for half a century, beginning soon after cars began to proliferate on the roads in the early 1900s. The entire idea of reducing the consequences of crashes wasn’t a consideration. A few advocates for a broader approach wanted to include things like installing and using safety belts to reduce deaths and injuries during crashes. These lone voices were ignored by the safety establishment of the time, but they didn’t fade away. They continued to grow, which made the existing road safety establishment uncomfortable.
This discomfort was apparent in 1961 remarks to the National Safety Congress by the president of General Motors, who criticized the work of “self-styled experts” who suggested “that we abandon hope of teaching drivers to avoid traffic accidents and concentrate on designing cars that will make collisions harmless”.
Science wins out
A few years later, the ‘self-styled experts’ prevailed. After Ralph Nader’s groundbreaking book Unsafe At Any Speed - the designed-in dangers of the American automobile was released, an outraged American public began baying for action to make cars safer. As a direct result, the focus of safety efforts became much broader. The new approach sought to reduce road deaths by focusing not only on driver behaviour but on crash prevention and crash injury prevention. For example, separating opposing lanes of traffic almost always reduces the number of road deaths, even though it makes no difference to the number of bad drivers on the road. Similarly, well-designed cars significantly reduce injury risk during crashes and may also reduce the consequences of crashes. For example, if fuel tanks can be designed to stay intact after a crash then there is far less chance that they will leak and therefore lead to post-crash fires.
Equally important was an unprecedented emphasis on scientific methods to evaluate highway safety programmes. This systematic, scientific approach has saved thousands of lives and prevented countless injuries since implementation in the 1970s. Today’s passenger vehicles are much safer. So are roadways.
But what about the nut behind the wheel? Because most motor vehicle crashes involve driver error, some people continue to this day to believe that improving driver behaviour should be the overriding priority. Claims continue to be made that ‘getting rid of drunk drivers’ or ‘improving driver skills’ is more important than separating opposing lanes of traffic or equipping cars with airbags. Blaming other people’s bad driving has a natural appeal whenever we are angry. We tend to see ourselves as good drivers and thus ignore our little mistakes, holding onto our positive view of ourselves. When other people make the same little mistakes however, we are outraged. It’s like double parking – when other people do it we mutter about ‘bloody inconsiderate drivers’ but when we do it, we tell ourselves that we’re just dropping someone off, so it’s okay.
That’s the essential reason that education programmes aimed at changing driver behaviour are generally ineffective. Worse, telling people to drive safely may actually cause more accidents, according to a major study by the American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
According to the report, which collated the results of dozens of other studies over the last 30 years:
“Research indicates that education has no effect, or only a very limited effect, on habits like staying within speed limits, heeding stop signs, and using safety belts.”
“[Until you check out the facts,] who can argue against the benefits of education or training?” asks Institute chief scientist Allan Williams. “But when good scientific evaluations are undertaken, most of the driver improvement programs based on education or persuasion alone are found not to work.”
Car enthusiasts, who tend to see speed limits as an unnatural intrusion on their freedom, often claim that lack of driver education, rather than speed, is the cause of road accidents. However, according to Jon S. Vernick of Johns Hopkins University, author of one literature review:
“There’s no evidence that high school driver education reduces motor vehicle crash involvement rates for young drivers.”
In some cases the education programme makes things worse. The Australian ‘bike ed’ programme was designed to reduce the number of collisions involving child cyclists by provided skills training in bicycle use. An analysis of the program by John Carlin of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and University of Melbourne suggested that far from reducing accidents, the program was causing them. Carlin concluded that the programme was inadvertently leading children “to undertake a level of risky activity that they would not have attempted without the ‘license’ provided by having completed the program.”
It’s not just in Australia that education has been shown to fail. After reviewing motorcycle rider education/training programs in three countries, Dan Mayhew of Canada’s Traffic Injury Research Foundation reports “no compelling evidence that rider training is associated with reductions in collisions.”
Even drivers whose skills are actually above average may not be safer. Research conducted in the early 1970s involved a group of highly skilled race drivers. Far from being safer drivers off the racetrack, this group was found to have worse on-road crash records than a group of average motorists. The racecar drivers’ knowledge and skills obviously were greater than those of the average drivers, but this didn’t translate into enhanced highway safety. A related problem is that high-risk drivers - the ones who most need to change their behaviour – are the most difficult group to influence. Safety belt use rates are lower among young drivers, speeders, and other risk-takers, for example, than among drivers in general.
Vernick points to another example:
“Because high school driver education programs contribute to earlier licensing for young drivers, these programs may actually increase motor vehicle fatality rates for young persons.”
Other examples include courses that teach skid control, offroad recovery, and other emergency manoeuvres. When these were taught to young men, the outcome was adverse. Mayhew says:
“Males who received training had higher crash rates than those who did not take the training. Authors of the relevant studies have suggested that males trained in these skills become overconfident in their ability and now take unnecessary risks.”
“The education might increase drivers’ knowledge (for example, about the benefits of using belts), but the expanded knowledge usually doesn’t result in behaviour changes. Yet support persists for programs like high school driver education; motorcycle education and training; education to increase safety belt and helmet use; and improvement programs for problem drivers, young drivers, and/or drivers in general. Such programs are commonplace, but many of them never get evaluated, typically because of their common-sense appeal.”
Such unexpected and unintended outcomes underscore the importance of conducting scientific evaluations of all intervention programs.
Knowledge alone isn’t enough, Williams says:
“This hasn’t happened sufficiently. The belief that increasing motorists’ or other road users’ knowledge will change their actions reflects a naive view of human behaviour. At one level all drivers know, for example, that it’s wrong to ignore stop signs and run red lights. Yet these obviously unsafe behaviours occur routinely. They’re leading causes of crashes. Another example is that by now all motorists know driving after consuming significant amounts of alcohol increases crash risk, but millions of trips are taken each year by seriously impaired drivers.”
An analogy involves educating students about drug use. One of the most prominent efforts, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (DARE), began in California in the early 1980s. Now DARE is in 80 percent of U.S. school districts plus many other countries. Yet numerous studies have found that the DARE curriculum, which features police officers teaching in classrooms, is ineffective. Richard Clayton, director of the Center for Prevention Research at the University of Kentucky, authored one of the studies:
“When we have something as complex and as hidden as drug abuse among adolescents, our usual answer to it is more education... It makes us, as adults, feel good that they’re getting this information, but we know information often times doesn’t carry much weight. We’ve got to step back and ask: ‘Is education ever the best magic bullet?’ I, for one, don’t think it is.”
Support for education continues anyway. The failure of education alone to influence drivers hasn’t kept it from being encouraged under U.S. law. The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century allows states to use some federal highway safety programme funds to produce and place media messages. This law does require yearly assessments of programme effectiveness but, as Williams points out:
“Television commercials in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s didn’t help improve highway safety, and they won’t help now unless they’re coupled with meaningful enforcement of traffic safety laws. If they aren’t, then the commercials and all the other educational efforts will be a waste of federal monies.”
It’s a prime example of wasting resources on an ineffective approach. Signs may impart information, but the added knowledge doesn’t necessarily result in safer driver behaviour. Why not? The answer goes to the crux of the failure of education alone. When surveyed, most drivers rate their own skills above average. Some rate their skills about the same as the average, but virtually none say they believe they’re below-average drivers. So most drivers don’t believe they need to be educated. They do believe in education, but they believe it’s for all the other ‘bad’ drivers on the road, not themselves.
Education is still tried the world over. Dinesh Mohan, who is Henry Ford Professor for Biomechanics and Transportation Safety at the Indian Institute of Technology, says:
“The education debate gets resurrected every day... A very large number of countries have safety messages on television, have put up billboards on thoroughfares, hold road safety weeks, distribute safety literature in schools, and have instituted safety committees and councils. This has been going on for two decades, but the carnage continues.”
Education & laws may sometimes change behaviour
Most demonstrable improvements in driver behaviour come from traffic safety laws. The clearest examples are those where the behaviours are readily observable and the changes are measurable - belt use, motorcycle helmet use, or travel speeds. Victoria, Australia, enacted the first safety belt law in 1970. Use rates, which had been 18-26 percent, immediately jumped to 75 percent in urban areas and 64 percent on rural roads. When other Australian states passed similar laws, each experienced big jumps in rates of buckling up.
But in North America, belt laws by themselves didn’t have the same effect. Canadian authorities added a program of periodic intensive enforcement, and the laws in some provinces were strengthened to include points on drivers’ licenses as part of the penalties. These approaches paid off. Driver belt use in Canada has topped 90 percent since 1994, as high as anywhere in the world. While education to change driver behaviour is almost never effective by itself, it’s beneficial when it enhances the effectiveness of traffic safety laws. It can build public support to enact the laws in the first place. Then education can enhance enforcement by increasing motorists’ perceptions of the risk of apprehension.
This ‘enforce & educate’ policy has been popular among road safety authorities in Australia & New Zealand, where extensive and creative highway safety advertising runs frequently on television and other media. However, the advertising works, according to professor Peter Vulcan of Monash University in Victoria, ‘only when it is done in direct support of high levels of enforcement, usually highly visible enforcement. You can start the process with compliance with traffic safety laws, but then to get the majority of road users to comply you need enforcement that is magnified by publicity.”
Other studies, however, have refuted Monash’s finding that educational ads work at all. There is, in particular, a great deal of doubt within the road safety community about the value of shock TV ads such as the ones run in both New Zealand and Australia (see Re-investigation of the effectiveness of the Victorian Transport Accident Commission’s Road Safety Campaigns, Dr Michael White et al, Transport SA November 2000). Much to the embarrassment of the Monash University Accident Research Centre, Dr White and his team pointed out that one of the key elements of the Monash report – a dramatic fall in road deaths following the beginning of the campaign – did not appear to be linked to the campaign at all. The marked reduction in road deaths had been occurring months before the campaign started. Further, claimed reductions in serious injuries were highly dubious, because the definition of serious injuries changed, which meant that less injuries were being defined as ‘serious’ and therefore they apparently dropped even though nothing had changed except the way that the accidents were being reported.
So why did the road toll start to plummet months before the education campaign started? Dr White has a rather more plausible explanation:
“First, there has been an ongoing downward trend in road deaths that has been noticed for decades.”
However, while the overall trend is downwards, the highs and lows tend to correspond almost exactly with economic activity. As Dr White put it:
“It is likely that relatively small changes in employment produce relatively large changes in the numbers of marginally employable young males on the road, with corresponding changes in crash numbers”.
It also seems highly probable that people simply take more risks during good times than during bad.
White’s theory that the peaks and troughs in the road toll are the result of economic circumstances may sound far-fetched, but it appears to be robustly supported by almost all available data and his conclusions have been duplicated in similar research around the world.
A paper on international trends in road crashes that was published in 2000 concluded:
“The fall in the accident rate that occurred in Victoria, Australia in the early 1990s following [the road safety education campaign] introduced in 1989 may simply have been the renewal of a downward trend in the accident rate that would have occurred without [the road safety education campaign].” (Beenstock & Gafni, 2000, P83)
ABC Radio producer Dr Norman Swan was even more scathing about the Victorian campaigns:
“A few years ago the Victorian Government, concerned that there’d been a rise in serious road crashes, created a high intensity, high impact television, press and billboard advertising campaign aimed at speed and drunk driving...The crash rate went down and fatality rates halved; and Victoria, proud of its achievement, promoted the concept of such an intense campaign, alongside other measures like speed cameras and upscaled random breath testing. New Zealand took up the idea with a budget of $7million a year on media ads alone, as did Western Australia. South Australia was tempted as well but there was a healthy scepticism, and the data was re-examined.
“What the South Australian researchers discovered was that the rise in road crashes prior to the television campaign was actually just a glitch in a steady 20-year long downward trend. And even taking the temporary rise into consideration, the falloff [in the road toll] started two years before the media campaign and countermeasures had swung into action...all that money [spent on advertising] was wasted.”
This doubt about the effectiveness of education campaigns extends far beyond the road safety community: Massey University marketing lecturer Terry Macpherson has rubbished New Zealand’s Land Transport Safety Authority claims that shock TV ads have saved 100 lives and 1000 serious injuries. According to Macpherson, the improvement in the road toll was the result of improved enforcement by the police, particularly the tough anti-drink-driving campaigns.
The long arm of the law
Compliance with traffic laws varies considerably. The greater the compliance, the more effective the laws. If motorists don’t know about a law or don’t believe it will be enforced, compliance will be limited.
But even laws that are frequently violated can have positive effects. A good example is speed limits. American studies show that many drivers routinely exceed them, but there’s still a safety benefit because drivers typically won’t go more than 10km/h faster than a posted limit.
This behaviour has nothing to do with choosing safe speeds to drive. It has everything to do with the perception that speed limits are actually being enforced at about 10km/h above what’s posted. Motorists are much more likely to change their behaviour in response to traffic laws than because of education about what increases crash risk. In large part this is because motorists believe their driving skills will enable them to avoid collisions. At the same time, they recognize their skills won’t enable them to avoid a ticket. So they slow down, buckle up or otherwise comply with the laws.
Keeping the focus on what works
There are a few instances when education alone can be effective in changing people’s behaviour. Children’s behaviour is generally easier to change than adults’; some child pedestrian programs have been successful (see Status Report, March 13,1999; on the web at www.highwaysafety.org).
Messages aimed at adults are more likely to be effective if the audience has something tangible at stake, like maintaining a job performance record. An alcohol education program at a U.S. Air Force base succeeded largely because psychiatric referral or discharge could be a consequence for a crash involving alcohol use.
It’s beneficial if the communicator has high credibility and if the desired behaviour has to be performed only once. For example, a doctor may only have to recommend installing a smoke detector once, because of his credibility with the patient.
Education programs that are longer and more extensive are apt to work better than shorter or limited efforts. But even gains from long-term education may diminish. For example, long-running anti-smoking programs have contributed to overall reductions in tobacco use, but in the early to mid-1990s there was a surprising upswing in teen smoking.
The time and money spent promoting highway safety strategies that don’t work inevitably steals critical resources from those that do. Advocates of educational programs may bring much needed public attention to problems, but the same voices could be more effective if their efforts were used to support countermeasures shown to work by scientific research. Telling people to drive safely is a great idea, but in most cases we’d be better off spending the money on lifesaving campaigns that work.
• Substantial parts of this article were originally published by the American Institute for Highway Safety.