Valery Kozlov
MD, Professor, "human factor" expert

Pedestrians should be taught psychology on the road

13 February 2012

There is a remarkable psychological expression - there are no good or bad people, there are people following a correct or erroneous behavior program. Therefore, the growing numbers of pedestrians involved in traffic road accidents can be only explained by improper setting of the system of the road safety. This system, therefore, is not capable of developing correct behavior program among pedestrians. Already the recognition of this fact allows starting the search of effective tools to reduce the gruesome statistics of pedestrian injuries and fatalities. If, however, we elect progressing the path whereby to put all the blame on the pedestrians this counterproductive approach will not produce any tangible result but the same beaten slogan "follow the traffic rules". Unfortunately, the latter approach is dominant as it is the only one. Therefore, nobody knows what to do to prevent road traffic injuries inflicted on pedestrians. There is a simple explanation to the status quo: the road safety system mainly consists of a primitive technocratic approach with almost non-existent psychological provision. There are no disciplines in curricula of the Russian universities to address transport psychology. There is a rare chance that an expert on transport psychology is found among the payroll of an institution dealing with the transport system. These are experts having engineering and other technical background that are taking leading positions in the road transport system. No wonder that they are "running the show" without having a clue as to what is going on, demonstrating their utter impotence.

Let us now try to understand why pedestrians under situation when they, unlike motor vehicle drivers, are given the priority at the pedestrian road crossings, are more likely to get under wheels of cars.

Anyone who is moving is pursuing two motives: to move in the safe manner and achieve as high performance as possible. These objectives are in conflict, moreover quite often they cannot be met at the same time. In practice, people unaware of the consequences, prefer to follow the second motive, that is, to achieve the best efficiency. The people are constantly on the move trying to do everything as fast as possible to feel a day with numerous chores. When the motion does not involve crossing roads for a long time people forget about the safety issues altogether. In this situation the mind-set is dominant to increase efficiency, i.e., the same things go faster and faster. The safety is taking a back seat, and people rarely even remember about it. This motivation became more intense when information was delivered that pedestrians got the priority right over drivers at pedestrian crossings. Of course, this reinforcement was interpreted by people not too knowledgeable in the issues of road traffic safety as the right to act at their wish while crossing the road anywhere. There is a belief (but statistics fails to confirm it as it does not take it into account), that as a rule among pedestrian casualties there are people who never drove by themselves and who have a distorted understanding about motor vehicle capabilities. In other words, they strongly believe that drivers will always spot them on the road and will always be able to stop the car they drive to avoid hitting pedestrians. These people have no idea about deceleration path; they assume that to stop the car the driver just have to press the brake pedal. These people are unaware of the fact that drivers can be distracted from monitoring the road conditions or there is inertia of a car as a physics body. They have no clue how to take into account such factors as the presence of obstacles that make perception difficult, the state of the road surface (snow, etc. ), outside illumination, etc. We should also remember that there are categories of people, i.e. Pedestrians who have a lower level of risk perception or are not capable of quickly switching from pursuing efficiency to the protection mode should the road conditions suddenly change for the worse.

We should acknowledge that amendments in TR, where the priority is given to pedestrians at the road crossings were not supported by any educational programs by the government agencies. No training was provided both for pedestrians and drivers. I think that not all drivers are aware of this fact. As always everything happened spontaneously, without psychological thinking through of how the decision would be reflected in human minds. None of the media gave psychological explanations to the activities under way. Therefore, albeit belatedly, this work should begin by emphasizing that there is ambivalence in the minds of pedestrians. But the priority grunted does not imply that violating traffic rules is possible. The pedestrians should be informed about dynamic characteristics of the driver’s reaction and the vehicle kinetics responding to a sudden appearance of a pedestrian on the road. Increasing fines without explanation campaigns will not be effective, since people will unconsciously stick with old mind-set. Incidentally, the increase in fines in civilized countries is always accompanied by introducing changes in education system. Here we also pursue our unique way. We keep raising fines. The time has come to make Russia civilized.

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