“Cautious driver” is not a real category. It’s not something my crash database can filter on.
Yes, obviously it is not a well-defined category, I mostly hoped that you could filter for taxi or similar.
Anyway, I am not claiming to be the best driver in the world (although I’m 100% safe at least w.r.t. drinking since I don’t drink at all), I’m just claiming to be at least as good as a taxi driver, and I would be really really surprised if it turned out that taxi drivers crash their vehicles with the same frequency as the general population.
https://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS050099.pdf ← there’s a paper that covers your exact question (comparing crashes in taxis and passenger cars. in case you don’t know the terminology, “fleet vehicle” refers to cars that are registered as work cars for an organisation, so more likely to be people on their “best behaviour” as far as drinking/speeding/etc)
Table 5 in particular, per 100 million vehicle kms travelled you have taxis having about half as many fatal crashes as cars but about 50% more injury crashes and maybe 10% more towaway crashes (eyeballing it)
Table 10 also shows that some 30% of taxi drivers involved in crashes weren’t wearing seat belts (they’re apparently not legally required to in NSW! news to me), which is a pretty big clue that taxi drivers aren’t the paragon of careful driving one might assume.
Table 10 also shows that some 30% of taxi drivers involved in crashes weren’t wearing seat belts (they’re apparently not legally required to in NSW! news to me), which is a pretty big clue that taxi drivers aren’t the paragon of careful driving one might assume.
WTF!?
Ok, I suppose I have to update my priors on taxi drivers (man, they even write “There is considerable anecdotal evidence that taxi drivers around the world drive in a manner the rest of the public considers to be unsafe”).
Do you have suggestions about other proxies for careful driving?
I suspect there is a large variation between countries in how safely taxi drivers drive relative to others.
In London my impression is that the taxis are driven more safely than non-taxis. In Singapore it appears obvious to casual observation that taxis are much less safely driven than most of the cars.
I can’t believe you’ve never heard the stereotype that taxi drivers aren’t safe drivers.
I don’t know about proxies for “careful driving”. That is not my area of expertise.
That said, it’s well-known that professional race car drivers die in car crashes at higher rates during their general driving (I don’t fancy digging up a citation; you can google it yourself).
I always think of the old chestnut that something like eighty percent of people think they’re above average at driving.
I attended a training course recently that stated that educating drivers about the dangers of texting while driving is not very useful, as everyone thinks that they are careful with how and where they choose to text (e.g. only while stopped), but they agree that other drivers shouldn’t. Apparently, they reckon it’s most effective to tell people “if you text and drive, your kids will grow up to text and drive too”. Psychology, eh?
I think all of those are very illustrative of the biases people have in how perceive their operation of their vehicles.
I am relatively convinced that 95% of crashes involve a variety of factors contributing (swiss cheese model). There is rarely, if ever, only one thing that causes a serious crash. As a road safety professional, then, my duty is to make sure that the road forgives any human errors. Safe Systems is the current philosophy in road safety, which states that nobody should be seriously injured or die on the road, even though people do make mistakes. And they do. All the time.
I always think of the old chestnut that something like eighty percent of people think they’re above average at driving.
This is a silly tangent, but I’m not sure that they’re wrong. If I think driving well means getting there as fast as possible and you think it means getting there safely as possible we can each (correctly!) think we’re better at driving than the other. So for 80% of drivers to correctly rate themselves above average all we need is 30%+ of drivers to value different behaviors in driving.
Also people may be thinking of “better than average” as ” fewer dangerous maneuvers per mile driven than the average across all drivers”, for which “I have to take evasive action to avoid a collision with other drivers far more often than they have to do so for me” is a reasonable estimate. And by that standard, if there are a few egregiously bad drivers, that may mean that almost everyone else is above average (not above median, but above average).
Yes, when it comes to ordinary driving situations, there’s only so good you can get, if you can get from A to B without trouble, without annoying and/or scaring your passengers or other people on the road, it’s hard to do noticeably better. It’s hard to get too much above the median; the 80th percentile driver won’t seem that different from the 50th percentile driver. But, you can be really bad and drag the average down. Thus, the average is below the median, ergo most people (most drivers, anyway) are above average drivers. (Even assuming we are using some identical, objective scale, which, as jefftk points out, is not going to be the case.)
Yes, obviously it is not a well-defined category, I mostly hoped that you could filter for taxi or similar.
Anyway, I am not claiming to be the best driver in the world (although I’m 100% safe at least w.r.t. drinking since I don’t drink at all), I’m just claiming to be at least as good as a taxi driver, and I would be really really surprised if it turned out that taxi drivers crash their vehicles with the same frequency as the general population.
https://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS050099.pdf ← there’s a paper that covers your exact question (comparing crashes in taxis and passenger cars. in case you don’t know the terminology, “fleet vehicle” refers to cars that are registered as work cars for an organisation, so more likely to be people on their “best behaviour” as far as drinking/speeding/etc)
Table 5 in particular, per 100 million vehicle kms travelled you have taxis having about half as many fatal crashes as cars but about 50% more injury crashes and maybe 10% more towaway crashes (eyeballing it)
Table 10 also shows that some 30% of taxi drivers involved in crashes weren’t wearing seat belts (they’re apparently not legally required to in NSW! news to me), which is a pretty big clue that taxi drivers aren’t the paragon of careful driving one might assume.
WTF!?
Ok, I suppose I have to update my priors on taxi drivers (man, they even write “There is considerable anecdotal evidence that taxi drivers around the world drive in a manner the rest of the public considers to be unsafe”).
Do you have suggestions about other proxies for careful driving?
I suspect there is a large variation between countries in how safely taxi drivers drive relative to others.
In London my impression is that the taxis are driven more safely than non-taxis. In Singapore it appears obvious to casual observation that taxis are much less safely driven than most of the cars.
I can’t believe you’ve never heard the stereotype that taxi drivers aren’t safe drivers.
I don’t know about proxies for “careful driving”. That is not my area of expertise.
That said, it’s well-known that professional race car drivers die in car crashes at higher rates during their general driving (I don’t fancy digging up a citation; you can google it yourself).
I always think of the old chestnut that something like eighty percent of people think they’re above average at driving.
I attended a training course recently that stated that educating drivers about the dangers of texting while driving is not very useful, as everyone thinks that they are careful with how and where they choose to text (e.g. only while stopped), but they agree that other drivers shouldn’t. Apparently, they reckon it’s most effective to tell people “if you text and drive, your kids will grow up to text and drive too”. Psychology, eh?
I think all of those are very illustrative of the biases people have in how perceive their operation of their vehicles.
I am relatively convinced that 95% of crashes involve a variety of factors contributing (swiss cheese model). There is rarely, if ever, only one thing that causes a serious crash. As a road safety professional, then, my duty is to make sure that the road forgives any human errors. Safe Systems is the current philosophy in road safety, which states that nobody should be seriously injured or die on the road, even though people do make mistakes. And they do. All the time.
This is a silly tangent, but I’m not sure that they’re wrong. If I think driving well means getting there as fast as possible and you think it means getting there safely as possible we can each (correctly!) think we’re better at driving than the other. So for 80% of drivers to correctly rate themselves above average all we need is 30%+ of drivers to value different behaviors in driving.
Also people may be thinking of “better than average” as ” fewer dangerous maneuvers per mile driven than the average across all drivers”, for which “I have to take evasive action to avoid a collision with other drivers far more often than they have to do so for me” is a reasonable estimate. And by that standard, if there are a few egregiously bad drivers, that may mean that almost everyone else is above average (not above median, but above average).
Yes, when it comes to ordinary driving situations, there’s only so good you can get, if you can get from A to B without trouble, without annoying and/or scaring your passengers or other people on the road, it’s hard to do noticeably better. It’s hard to get too much above the median; the 80th percentile driver won’t seem that different from the 50th percentile driver. But, you can be really bad and drag the average down. Thus, the average is below the median, ergo most people (most drivers, anyway) are above average drivers. (Even assuming we are using some identical, objective scale, which, as jefftk points out, is not going to be the case.)