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Road Safety Experts Worry as Aggressive Driving Thrives

A Report from the Seminar on Aggressive Driving Behaviour

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 

Palais des Nations, Geneva

April 5, 2004

Whether you are the victim of obscene gestures in Australia, tailgating on a German motorway, verbal abuse in Argentina or abrupt lane changing in Greece, aggression is growing on the world’s roads.

Those were the top examples of aggressive road behaviour cited in each country, according to a survey that was presented at a road safety meeting in Geneva, this week, focusing on the psychological antics of drivers.

The poll by Gallup International also found that 65 to 84 percent of drivers in the European Union, Russia, United States and Australia felt that fellow road users had become more aggressive in recent years. But national perceptions or experiences of bad behaviour at the wheel vary somewhat.

Only seven percent of Italians polled by Gallup for the UN meeting felt they had been aggressively pursued at a close distance by another driver, as opposed to 78 percent of Germans.

Use of mobile phone

Sixty three percent of Italians, however, were very irritated by drivers who used their mobile telephone at the wheel, against 19 percent of Finns, while southern Europeans were more often victims of verbal abuse than northerners.

Regardless of the symptoms, road safety experts from more than 30 countries who met in Geneva on Monday and Tuesday fear that aggressive driving is making a substantial contribution to the global annual road accident death toll of 1.2 million.

“Several studies have underlined that over 90 percent of accidents have an incorrect driver behaviour as their main cause,” said UN transport official Jose Capel Ferrer.

Ex-Soviet states are suffering from some of the highest road accident death rates, seven times those of west European countries in 2001, according to the UN.

Aggressive behaviour

“The main factor causing traffic accidents is aggressive behaviour on the roads,” Viktor Kiryanov of Russia’s transport ministry told the UN meeting.

Based on accident statistics, young men and high mileages are universally rated by insurers as the most volatile mix behind the wheel.

But a study carried out in Britain, the Netherlands and Finland found that intentional aggression or deliberate violation of road rules, rather than a propensity to make mistakes due to inexperience or misjudgment, were a more useful way of judging risk.

“Those who made more errors did not have more accidents, but those who commit more violations were more likely to have accidents,” study author and University of Manchester psychologist Dianne Parker said.

“Not all young males are high violators and not all high violators are young males. But all high violators choose their behaviours,” she added.

“This is crucially important... We do not simply find ourselves overtaking on the inside or gesturing to another,” Parker pointed out.

Worse still, the evidence indicated that drivers nowadays have few inhibitions about retaliating against fellow road users.

“There is a strong link between being the aggressor and feeling aggressed,” Leendert de Voogd of Gallup commented.

Discourtesy on the road

The Manchester study revealed that 65 percent of drivers were ready to respond by beeping their horn, flashing their lights, swearing or making a gesture.

About one-fifth were even ready to get out of their car to argue or fight.

Discourtesy and impatient driving were rated as most likely to generate irritation.

But gestures, verbal abuse or a blast of a horn touched on deeper personal feelings, according to Parker.

“This threatens your identity as a better than average driver and of course we all feel we are a better than average driver,” she explained.

While the frustration of being stuck in traffic congestion was also blamed for some pent-up anger, the competitive demands of modern society have found their way onto the road.

“The days when you took your turn for promotion at work have ended,” Andrew Howard, head of road safety at Britain’s AA motoring trust said. “Yet on the road we still expect people to take their turn, not to take risks.”

Howard pointed out that drivers took similar calculated risks to those they apply in their career when they overtook a traffic jam and leapfrogged to the head of the queue, more often than not with success.

“In short, we may now live in a world where instrumental aggression in traffic can reward the aggressor,” he concluded.