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David Crundall David Crundall is a Professor of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, where he specialises in Traffic and Transport Psychology and leads the Transport Research in Psychology group (TRiP). Outside of the university he is the chair of the Road User Behaviour Working Group for the UK Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) and is an affiliate of UKROEd, with responsibility for writing course content for the UK’s National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme. He is also one of the co-founders of Esitu Solutions Ltd., a spin-out company from NTU with a mission to bring hazard perception assessment and training to the professional driver and fleet markets. He has won nearly £5 million in research grants and has published over 100 academic papers in the field.
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Three innovations in hazard perception research The hazard perception test originated in the UK with research dating back to the 1960s. There is growing international interest in hazard perception testing for driver licensing, and academic research in the field has become truly global. Every research group approaches hazard perception differently (with over 100 different measures of hazard perception recorded over a range of academic papers), many of which may offer promising avenues for future assessments and training. At NTU we have pioneered a number of innovations that may hold such promise. Our earliest innovation was the development of the hazard prediction test. This was designed to overcome one of the problems of response-time-based hazard perception tests, where temporal scoring windows can penalise highly experienced drivers who may spot early clues to the impending danger and respond too soon. The hazard prediction test instead stops the clip at the point where the hazard onsets and we simply ask, “What happens next?”. Data are briefly presented to show that this test can be more effective than the typical response-time hazard perception test. Finally, we understand that hazard perception is not the complete answer to road safety. While it is a good measure of how well we can respond to the dangerous actions of others, it does not assess how dangerous our own actions are. Building on our hazard perception methodology and taking inspiration from the few behavioural risk profilers available outside the UK, we have begun to develop risk-taking tests using video scenarios that prompt behavioural responses. These tests allow us to unpack the level of risk that drivers are willing to adopt when driving. We have several tests in development including our amber gambler test and our tailgating test. I present data from a pilot study on the latter test, where our drivers watched short videos of car-following. Each clip ends on a freeze-frame, at which point drivers have the opportunity to move the lead car closer or further away from themselves via a virtual sliding scale beneath the video. Their responses on this test were predicted by violation scores on the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire. Interestingly, when asked to choose either a ‘safe distance’ from the car ahead, or a ‘distance that they felt comfortable at’, our drivers chose shorter headways for their own driving comfort than they thought were safe. In conclusion, hazard perception is a varied field that constantly innovates and moves forward. National licensing agencies should maintain awareness of developments in this field, especially when planning to refresh their licensing procedures. |
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