“Cautious driver” is not a real category. It’s not something my crash database can filter on.
You make mistakes when you drive. We all do. It is human nature, and driving is a complex chain of tasks.
If you never speed, never drive after even one drink, never break a single road rule, know every single road rule (in my jurisdiction the road traffic code is some 400 pages long!), never take gaps in traffic that are too close, never go through an orange light too late, never jaywalk, always ensure your car is mechanically up to date, etc etc etc, then you are either pathological about your rule following or a liar.
I do crash analysis as part of my job, almost every day. I can tell you there are PLENTY of bus crashes—buses going before the passengers were sat down resulting in minor injuries, buses hitting pedestrians resulting in hospitalisation, heck I was in a bus about a year ago that rear-ended a car in front of it. I only have access to data in one jurisdiction and I don’t believe that data includes taxis, uber drivers, etc. Anecdotally my uber drivers often adjust the GPS when they’re driving and tend to speed so I wouldn’t call them particularly cautious.
For the record, as far as I know I don’t have the right to pull out my jurisdiction’s crash data so I won’t be able to respond to specific requests. I do know that “bus” is a category of vehicle we have. I don’t know whether taxi is.
seriously I just searched for “pedestrian hit by a bus” and there are SO MANY in Australia. With a cursory search I see three in Perth (2 million in the greater metro area) in the last six months.
“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 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.)
“Cautious driver” is not a real category. It’s not something my crash database can filter on.
What makes “cautious driver” “not a real category”? You don’t mean that it’s “not a real category” just because you don’t have data on it in your database… do you?
I mean it doesn’t describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don’t, etc.
Are you suggesting that there’s no correlation between such behaviors (e.g. between frequency of drinking and driving vs. frequency of texting and driving, or vs. frequency of speeding, or vs. frequency of failing to use turn signals properly, etc.)?
(Because if there are such [positive] correlations, then a “carefulness” factor would emerge, such that we could give the value of the factor for a given driver and it would predict behavioral metrics we hadn’t measured yet. That would be objective and measurable.)
Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
“Cautious driver” is not a real category. It’s not something my crash database can filter on.
You make mistakes when you drive. We all do. It is human nature, and driving is a complex chain of tasks.
If you never speed, never drive after even one drink, never break a single road rule, know every single road rule (in my jurisdiction the road traffic code is some 400 pages long!), never take gaps in traffic that are too close, never go through an orange light too late, never jaywalk, always ensure your car is mechanically up to date, etc etc etc, then you are either pathological about your rule following or a liar.
I do crash analysis as part of my job, almost every day. I can tell you there are PLENTY of bus crashes—buses going before the passengers were sat down resulting in minor injuries, buses hitting pedestrians resulting in hospitalisation, heck I was in a bus about a year ago that rear-ended a car in front of it. I only have access to data in one jurisdiction and I don’t believe that data includes taxis, uber drivers, etc. Anecdotally my uber drivers often adjust the GPS when they’re driving and tend to speed so I wouldn’t call them particularly cautious.
For the record, as far as I know I don’t have the right to pull out my jurisdiction’s crash data so I won’t be able to respond to specific requests. I do know that “bus” is a category of vehicle we have. I don’t know whether taxi is.
EDIT:
https://www.9news.com.au/national/liverpool-crash-pedestrian-dies-hit-by-bus-sydney-south-west/6eba1c4a-0825-4828-87c1-b530e5e4e2b5 - a man in Sydney died after being hit by a bus a month ago
https://thewest.com.au/news/traffic/perth-crash-man-hit-by-bus-on-wellington-street-as-police-close-road-c-12809596 (paywall i can’t bypass) - a man in Perth was hit by a bus last week
seriously I just searched for “pedestrian hit by a bus” and there are SO MANY in Australia. With a cursory search I see three in Perth (2 million in the greater metro area) in the last six months.
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 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.)
What makes “cautious driver” “not a real category”? You don’t mean that it’s “not a real category” just because you don’t have data on it in your database… do you?
I mean it doesn’t describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don’t, etc.
Are you suggesting that there’s no correlation between such behaviors (e.g. between frequency of drinking and driving vs. frequency of texting and driving, or vs. frequency of speeding, or vs. frequency of failing to use turn signals properly, etc.)?
(Because if there are such [positive] correlations, then a “carefulness” factor would emerge, such that we could give the value of the factor for a given driver and it would predict behavioral metrics we hadn’t measured yet. That would be objective and measurable.)
Yeah, okay.
Look at me thinking like an engineer—“but it’s not useful from a practical point of view because we don’t have access to that data”.
Sure, that’s a reasonable view.
Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I’m glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.