Youth and fatigue can make for deadly driving
It’s that time of year again - time for Christmas carols and
elevated media coverage of road crashes. The disastrous incident
that killed five members of the Corcoran family naturally generates
interest and a collective horror that so many lives can be
devastated in a single crash. Yet every serious crash damages the
lives of many people - even if they are not all in the same car.
Also not unusual are two aspects of the Narrabri crash: the
involvement of a young, male driver and the possible involvement of
fatigue.
We’ve heard that young male drivers are overinvolved in road
crashes almost as often as we’ve heard Jingle Bells, but we
still haven’t licked the problem. The inevitable chorus of calls
for increased training of younger drivers is overly simplistic.
Research has repeatedly shown that training in “advanced
car-handling skills”, like skid pan training, does not improve
younger-driver safety. By increasing perceived skill more than
actual skill it may even promote risky driving. Drivers who think
they can get out of a sticky situation (even if they can’t) will be
less likely to avoid it in the first place. To develop more
effective training for younger drivers we need a thorough
understanding of a complex problem.
Younger drivers do engage in more risky driving than older
drivers, some of it probably inadvertent. Novice drivers may not
have mastered completely the basic car-handling or hazard awareness
skills required for safe driving, and there is a peak in crashes
during the first six months of driving. The Graduated Licensing
System goes a long way towards ensuring that the basic skill
training occurs before a full licence is granted, and the
increasing attention given to hazard awareness in training programs
is gratifying. However, the extremely risky driving behaviours
which cause the most serious crashes, and are probably recognised
as risky by the driver, appear to increase with experience -
perhaps because drivers become overconfident in their ability to
negotiate hazards successfully.
Youth, rather than inexperience, appears to be a major
contributor to intentional risk-taking, and raising the driving age
might be an effective approach to improving young-driver safety
(although it brings significant issues relating to mobility and
independence). In a recent survey we found that younger drivers
demonstrated more positive attitudes towards risk than older
drivers, and younger respondents particularly valued risky driving
for seeking experience, confidence, excitement, sensation and
prestige. Our research also indicates that younger drivers are
strongly influenced by their peers’ opinions.
These findings speak for the value of providing safer situations
for young people to test their boundaries, and advertising that
gives younger drivers negative images of risky driving (such as the
recent campaign implying that the peers of a deliberately speeding
driver think that he is compensating for a small penis). Further,
it may be helpful to address those younger drivers who have an
unusually strong affinity for taking risks as a distinct group.
Our findings also suggest that risk-taking may have a
developmental value for younger people. Recent neuroscientific
studies suggest that brain processes responsible for control and
co-ordination of behaviour, called executive functions, do not
mature until the mid-twenties. In late adolescence there is a
proliferation of neural connections in the relevant brain areas,
such as the prefrontal cortex. These connections must be “pruned”
before executive functions, such as impulse control, can operate
properly. “Pruning” occurs via experience of appropriate
situations, and training that provides targeted experience may be
used to accelerate this process. Computer tasks that have shown
promise for training impulse control could be developed to reduce
risky driving among younger drivers. And so additional training of
younger drivers may yet reap benefits. It will just look very
different from the “advanced driver training” that proponents
typically call for.
In many respects driver fatigue is simpler to understand.
Fatigue impairs a driver’s ability to make the complex judgments
that are often required on the road, and increases a driver’s
chance of falling asleep at the wheel, especially under monotonous
conditions. Drivers are most likely to be fatigued when they have
had insufficient sleep, when it is a long time since they slept,
when it is a time that they would normally be sleeping, or when
they have been driving for a while. Other factors which impair
driving, such as alcohol and distraction, exaggerate the effects of
fatigue. Christmas, with its late nights of drinking, early
mornings of present-opening, busy days of backyard cricket and long
stretches of travel, is a time to be particularly vigilant. Make
sure you are well rested before you get behind the wheel.
Dr Julie Hatfield is senior research fellow at the NSW Injury
Risk Management Research Centre at the University of NSW.
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