Can infrastructure improvements mitigate unsafe traffic safety culture: A driving simulator study exploring cross cultural differences

This paper presents the results of a cross-cultural study to investigate the influence of traffic safety culture and infrastructure improvements on driver behaviour. To achieve this, the driving style of UK drivers was compared with that of Nigerians with and without experience of driving in the UK. A driving simulator experiment compared the actual driving style of these three groups of drivers in different safety critical scenarios. The simulated road environment varied depending on how much infrastructure was provided (low or high infrastructure). In addition, the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire was used to collect self-reported data on violations, errors and lapses. It was hypothesised that Nigerian drivers with no experience of driving in a UK road system would report and engage in more unsafe driving behaviour compared to the other two groups, and that increasing infrastructure would have little positive benefit. Overall, the results supported these hypotheses, indicating that the behaviours of drivers are interpretable in relation to their traffic safety culture, compared to changes in their driving environment.     

Cultural foundations of safety culture: A comparison of traffic safety culture in China,Japan and the United States

Understanding how to assess the influence of culture on traffic safety is important for improving traffic safety globally. Traffic safety culture is embedded in the larger context of country’s cultural norms and values, producing different safety outcomes even when other factors are similar. The current work examines how culture influences traffic safety outcomes in three of the largest automobile countries in the world, but which have very different cultural values and which also have very different traffic safety outcomes: China, Japan and the United States. China has an emerging driver population and cultural values that result in aberrant driving behaviors and “scrambling” to gain the right of way, producing a high number of crashes. Japan has an established driver culture, but an emphasis on reducing risk, which results in a lower rate of crashes. The United States, with the most established “car culture”, has an historical and cultural view of the car as a representation of freedom, leading to choices that result in higher crash rates than many countries around the world. The current work explores these cultural underpinnings for traffic safety culture in each country by establishing the historical basis for a traffic culture, examining road, vehicle engineering and legal standards, and reviewing available crash data and data on safety attitudes. These countries are compared across the different dimensions to establish unique cultural influences on traffic safety.     

The role of values in road safety culture: Examining the valuation of freedom to take risk,risk taking and accident involvement in three countries

National focus on individual freedom versus paternalistic values is a fundamental theme, which defines the status of traffic safety in different countries. The present study examines the role of such values in road safety culture based on survey data from car and bus drivers from three countries with distinctly different road safety records: Norway (N = 596), Israel (N = 129) and Greece (N = 386). While Norway has the highest road safety level in Europe, and Israel also performs better than the EU average, the road safety level in Greece was far below the EU average. As these positions reflect differences in policies and national regulations in drivers’ freedom to take risk, we hypothesize a higher focus on individual freedom to take risk and lower focus on paternalism among the Greek drivers. Results indicate, in accordance with our hypothesis, that the Greek drivers value freedom to take risk in traffic higher than drivers from Norway and Israel. Greek drivers also expect higher levels of risk taking from other drivers in their country, they report higher levels of risky driving themselves, and are more often involved in accidents. Thus, it seems that values have an important role in Road Safety Culture (RSC), legitimizing and motivating risky driving, which are related to accidents. We found, however, contrary to our hypotheses, that the Greek drivers also had the most paternalistic attitudes among the drivers in the three countries. In the present paper, we try to solve this Greek paradox.