Do Collisions Make Young Drivers Safer?

Source: Thue via Wikimedia Commons

I have three kids, and over the years, I have seen each of them get a driver’s license and go out on their own. I didn’t consider myself an anxious parent, yet I still worried a bit every time the kids took off in their cars. After all, I remember some of the silly things I did in my car as a teenager—accelerating quickly out of traffic lights, zipping around corners, and speeding on the highway.

Eventually, those teenage tendencies calm down a bit. Drivers get safer. That is why the car insurance rates for teens are so much higher than for adults.

There are many factors that contribute to people becoming safer drivers as they get older. There is a general tendency for people to get less sensation-seeking as they age. People’s sense of the risks of an accident also start to outweigh the thrill of dangerous driving.

An interesting question is whether being involved in a collision affects driving behavior? When teens have first-hand experience with a crash, does that make them less likely to drive dangerously in the future?

This question was explored in a paper in the April, 2017 issue of Psychological Science by Fearghal O’Brien, Joe Bible, Danping, Liu, and Bruce Simons-Morton.

It turns out that it is hard to assess people’s driving behavior. You can ask them about their attitudes about driving and their behaviors, but teens may not know enough about safe driving to give accurate assessments about their safety. In addition, when teens are aware that they are driving unsafely, they may not want to admit it.

So, these authors did something more elaborate. As part of a broad study, they were able to put data collection devices in the cars of 254 drivers who were 16- or 17-years-old. These devices had cameras pointed inside the car as well as forward. They also had a device to measure acceleration. When someone is driving dangerously, then they have lots of significant accelerations and decelerations in driving. They may pull away quickly from traffic lights, swerve around corners, or jam on the brakes.

So, the authors counted the number of these significant acceleration/deceleration events per 1,000 miles driven each month for the drivers in the study. That was a measure of how dangerously the teens were driving.

Of the teens in the study, 41 were involved in significant collisions (meaning that the police had to be notified of the accident). So, how did these crashes affect driving behavior?

First off, the driving behavior of teens who had a collision was compared to that of the teens who did not have a collision in the months before they had a crash. Teens who were involved in a crash were more dangerous drivers overall. That is, on average, they had a higher number of acceleration/deceleration events than the teens who did not have a crash. That means that these teens were more prone to accelerate quickly, turn sharply, and brake suddenly.

After the crash, teens changed their behavior immediately. In the month after the crash, they had many fewer acceleration/deceleration events. This change persisted in the second month after the crash. However, by the third month after the crash, these teens had many more of these acceleration/deceleration events. By three months after the crash, these teens were driving more dangerously than teens who had not been involved in a crash.

This analysis suggests that having a significant crash does affect the behavior of teens for a few months. By the third month after the collision, however, they returned to the style of driving they engaged in before the crash.

There are two interesting aspects to this study. First, crashes are not purely random events. Drivers who engage in more dangerous behavior really are more likely to get into a collision than those who drive more safely. Second, direct experience with the dangers of driving has only a short-term impact on overall behavior.

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