Have you ever felt the red mist rise when driving? Let’s face it, sometimes it doesn’t take much to feel stress and frustration on the road, especially in Malaysia – whether it’s a driver who’s too slow, a dangerous pullout, or someone who’s slow off the mark at a green light.
While anger certainly doesn’t make things better, a new study by researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom shows it can actually make things worse, and adversely affect a driver’s performance on the road.
The scientists looked at the performance of more than 1,700 drivers who were confronted with a situation of frustration, with the aim of determining whether this could have an impact on their driving.
Published in the journal “Accident Analysis and Prevention”, their meta-analysis reveals that aggressive driving does, indeed, induce a change in behaviour that leads to multiple errors on the road.
In fact, they report that those in the road-rage group drive faster (5 km/h on average) and respect the rules of the road much less (not using the turn signal when changing lanes, for example) than the control group.
Angry or stressed drivers made 2.51 times more driving errors.
In light of these findings, and as the deployment of autonomous cars approaches, the scientists believe these results could pave the way for the development of systems to monitor aggressive driving in vehicles.
“This research is significant because, as the era of autonomous vehicles approaches, road traffic will be a mix of both autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles, driven by people that may engage in aggressive driving,” they wrote.
“This is the first study to characterise aggressive driving behaviour quantitatively in a systematic way, which may help the autonomous vehicles identify potential aggressive driving in the surrounding environment,” added study lead author Zhizhuo Su.
More concretely, this kind of system would allow vehicles to detect aggressive driving and, therefore, an increased risk of driver errors, and react accordingly.
“Over the last few decades, road-safety policies, infrastructure changes, and improved vehicle safety have significantly reduced road casualties,” said study co-author Roger Woodman. “However, human error, which is often a result of aggressive driving, remains a leading cause of crashes.
“To make driving safer, our research focuses on methods for understanding the state of the driver, and to identify risky driving behaviours through the use of a driver-monitoring system.”
The researcher suggests this could be achieved by the autonomous deploying of calming techniques, such as reducing the noise level inside the car or playing relaxing music, or simply by reducing the speed of the vehicle – all solutions that could be implemented to reduce the risk of accidents linked to aggressive driving.