The effectiveness of police enforcement of traffic laws depends critically on thev attitudes of the driving public; as well as that of the police themselves. This means that it is important to know what drivers think about general issues such as road safety, enforcement and traffic laws, as well as what they think about particular issues such as speeding and drink-driving. This paper reports the findings of an analysis of the SARTRE database that has detailed information on the attitudes of over 15 thousand European drivers. It focuses specifically on drivers’ attitudes and reported behaviours that are relevant to enforcement; another paper (D8) examines the attitudes of involved agencies such as the police and the courts. A multiple correspondence analysis approach was used to produce a two-dimensional space reflecting drivers’ general attitudes to enforcement (using the ‘active’ variables). The axes (or factors) describing this space reflected: firstly a general ‘social respect’ attitude indicating acceptance of, or respect for, the law such that it was possible to identify drivers with ‘positive’ (safe and socially desirable) attitudes compared to drivers who held ‘negative’ attitudes towards safety and enforcement. The second dimension reflected the drivers’ attitude about the contribution of human or vehicle factors in traffic accidents – contrasting those drivers who attribute the cause of accidents more frequently to human errors, to those who think that failures related to the vehicle lead to accidents more often. The technique used meant it was possible to superimpose other variables, such as sociodemographic and national (country) variables onto this attitude ‘map’. This revealed the importance of factors such as age, gender, annual kilometres driven, level of education and annual income in shaping attitudes towards safety and enforcement. Similarly, the analysis identified where the ‘average’ of drivers in each country were positioned. This meant it was possible to identify countries where drivers, in general, had better or worse attitudes. By grouping countries whose drivers shared similar attitudes it was possible to identify 6 separate types of drivers (each consisting of the drivers from between 2 and 4 individual countries). The attitudes and reported behaviour of these 6 groups were then analysed in more detail with respect to particular issues such as seatbelt wearing, speeding, drink-driving and acceptance of European harmonisation of traffic laws. Finally, the results are discussed with reference to how enforcement might be improved in the future to help road safety in Europe. (Author/publisher) For an overview off all working papers and deliverables of the ESCAPE project, see http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj6/escape/deliver.htm
Samenvatting