SARTRE, an acronym for "Social Attitudes to Road Traffic Risk in Europe", is a research project, which aims at studying the opinions and reported behaviours of car drivers throughout Europe. The project is based on ad hoc data collection, which involves a representative questionnaire survey. All countries in our scope apply similar countermeasures to improve the safety of road traffic. Concerning drivers’ behaviour, everywhere speeding, driving under influence of alcohol or wearing of seat belt are submitted to regulations. An interesting fact is that the various countries, beyond common aspects, obtain apparently different success in their policies to reduce road traffic risk. This is a reason to develop a comparative study to learn best practices from each other. It is widely recognised that human factors intervene in most, if not all, road accidents. It is a major reason for the present project to contribute to put forward the role of human factors in the road accidents origin. More specifically, the social dimension of human factors will be studied. What are the social groups that are supporting or against some measures, are they numerous or influent? The main purposes of this project are to describe the state of drivers attitudes and reported behaviours throughout the continent with regard to road traffic risk, to evaluate the range from approval to opposition towards regulations and countermeasures, to search for underlying social or cultural factors leading to various behaviours in term of risk, and lastly to recommend actions to be taken into consideration when improving road safety policies. The trends also are important to detect. The situation in various countries can be improving or in contrast deteriorating. We also can differentiate the evolution regarding the individual countermeasures and notice that in some cases such as drunk driving, the attitude is improving, whereas the attitude to speeding is deteriorating. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting