Citation

Jeffrey DW, Foley J, Waller PF. Proc. Am. Assoc. Automot. Med. Annu. Conf. 1972; 16: 80-92.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1972, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A major goal of those engaged in highway safety research is to reduce accident involvement and fatalities. Several approaches are utilized toward this end. One may design safer roads and traffic patterns. More crashworthy cars may be designed to minimize human injury and death when auto accidents occur, police surveillance may be increased to detect potentially dangerous driving habits and educate individual drivers as to these dangers, and drivers with a higher than average probability of accident involvement may be educated and cautioned about their driving or have their license restricted if necessary. These factors, then, the highway, the automobile, and the driver compose a triad directing the highway safety community toward the sources of potential danger. Progress has been made in both highway and automobile design, to insure safety of the driving population. The third corner of the triangle, the driver, for various reasons, is more difficult to redesign or manipulate, or update, and often to understand, and the driver is the focal point of our concerns in this report.

The human organism is difficult to understand and thus where the human element is paramount, auto accidents are not readily predictable or readily prevented. People's driving patterns and habits change according to a variety of circumstances, events, and factors of every-day life. There is evidence, both anecdotal and research based, that personal stress and crisis as well as life style changes may predispose a driver to operate in a way to increase the probability of accident involvement. In addition, if we look at the occurrence of traffic violations, in the person who normally does not collect traffic tickets, we might judge an increase in traffic violations rate to be a suggestion of changes of driving patterns which may place the driver potentially nearer to exposure to accident involvement.

This question of the relationship between stress, personal crisis, and life style changes, and vulnerability to auto accident and violation involvement will be discussed as antecedent to reporting an attempt to link these elements in a descriptive analysis of traffic safety problems.