 |
Driving a car for work:
the accident risk |
|
|
| Employers must change the conditions under
which employees drive to reduce distractions, time pressures
and fatigue, thereby cutting accident levels, says Chris Baughan,
chief research scientist, safety and environment, at TRL |
 |
| "People who drove a
company car regularly for work had an estimated 40 to 50%
more accidents than private motorists" |
Do company car drivers have more accidents than private motorists?
Do they drive less safely and, if so, what might be done about it?
These are questions addressed in research conducted by Transport
Research Laboratory (TRL) for the Department for Transport. Since
about half of all new cars in Britain are company-owned, these are
important questions for road safety policy in general, as well as
for company car drivers and their employers. It has long been held
that company car drivers face an unusually high accident risk. But
the size of any such effect, and the explanation of it, have been
investigated only relatively recently. Government figures show that
company-owned cars cover on average nearly three times the annual
mileage for privately-owned cars.
Such a disparity in exposure to risk means that we ought to expect
company drivers to have more accidents than private drivers. However,
the actual difference in accidents per year is much larger than
can be accounted for in this way. TRL research in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, summarised by Downs et al 1999, found that even
after adjusting for differences in annual mileage and in drivers’
age and sex, people who drove a company-owned car regularly for
work had an estimated 40 to 50% more accidents than private motorists.
In other words, if a group of company drivers is matched with a
group of private motorists in terms of age, sex and annual mileage,
the company drivers would have one and a half times as many accidents
as the private drivers.
The finding suggests that there is something about the drivers themselves,
the way that they drive, or the types of journeys they do, that
increases their accident risk. That research studied all accidents
that drivers reported in specially-designed questionnaire surveys.
Most of these were damage-only accidents rather than personal injury
accidents so we still needed to ask whether the findings would apply
to injury accidents as well. Sometimes it has been suggested that
they would not; that the excess risk for company car drivers will
apply mainly to damage accidents resulting from the company driver’s
lack of financial incentive to care about minor bumps and scrapes
(the “not my car” explanation).
But the opposite might be true: if company drivers tend to have
higher speed collisions because they drive faster or because they
are more likely to fall asleep at the wheel, they would tend to
have higher severity collisions than private drivers. Recent research
by TRL has replaced this conjecture with some facts (Broughton et
al, 2003). We surveyed a representative sample of all drivers, and
a sample of drivers who had recently been involved in an injury
accident reported to the police. The idea was to find out whether
company drivers were
over-represented in the injury accident sample. The results indicated
that drivers who clock up over 80% of their mileage for work have
about 53% more injury accidents than private drivers of the same
age and sex who do the same overall mileage, and the same proportion
of their mileage on motorways. To help find out why, and what might
be done to reduce the risk of work-related driving, drivers completed
questionnaires. One of the most telling differences between company
and private drivers concerned how often they reported driving in
various situations associated with time pressure, distraction and
fatigue. Their responses are summarised in Figure 1, which shows
the percentage of drivers who reported driving at least “quite
often” in each situation.
|
| "The distracting influence
of hands-free phone conversations is now well established" |
There were very large differences between private and company drivers.
For example, of drivers who did over 80% of their mileage for work,
59% reported using a hands-free phone at least “quite often”
while driving. The corresponding figure for private-only drivers
was 3%. The distracting influence of hands-free phone conversations
is now well established by research at TRL and elsewhere. Driving
more than 50 miles after a full day’s work is one of the predictors
of falling asleep at the wheel, which accounts for a substantial
proportion of serious accidents. Here, the figures for the same
two groups of drivers were 50% and 4%. For driving under time pressure,
they were 55% and 14%. What these results suggest is that to improve
the safety of their car drivers, employers need to change the conditions
under which they drive, so as to reduce distraction, time-pressure
and fatigue.
Failure to do this is likely to undermine improvements that might
otherwise come from driver training. This conclusion accords well
with a framework for describing driver behaviour (Hatakka et al,
2002) that is becoming increasingly influential, and is illustrated
in Figure 2. The Goals of Driver Education (GDE) framework recognises
four levels of behaviour, each associated with particular types
of goals and motives. The two lower levels are concerned with basic
vehicle control and dealing with traffic. These are the traditional
subjects of driver-training. The two upper levels are concerned
with behaviour related to journey goals, and behaviour associated
with the driver’s own attitudes, motives and other personal
characteristics. The point here is that knowledge, skills and goals
associated with the upper levels of the framework influence how
a driver uses his or her lower-level driving skills and knowledge
and thus are likely to have a profound effect on safety.
The future challenge for driver training and education is to improve
drivers’ abilities to recognise and deal with higher-level
influences on behaviour, such as journey goals and their own motives,
attitudes and self-control. But relying on training alone, even
when it attempts to deal with such factors, is unlikely to be sufficient
if undermining the day-to-day demands that employers make of their
drivers. Employers have direct control over many of the level-3
journey-related goals and risk-increasing factors. Tackling them,
while using driver training to improve drivers’ ability to
recognise and deal with risks that remain, seems likely to be a
powerful way forward.
References
Broughton, J, Baughan, C, Pearce, L, Smith, L and Buckle, G (2003).
Work-Related Road Accidents. TRL Report 582. Transport Research
Laboratory, Crowthorne
Downs, CG, Keigan, M, Maycock, G and Grayson, GB (1999). The Safety
of Fleet Car Drivers: a Review. TRL Report 390. Transport Research
Laboratory, Crowthorne
Hatakka, M., Keskinen, E, Gregersen, NP, Glad, A and Hernetkoski,
K (2002). From Control of the Vehicle to Self-Control; Broadening
the Perspectives to Driver Education. Transportation Research Part
F 5, pp 201-215.
|
|
|
