The present document is working-paper 3 (Wpr) ‘Non-compliance and accidents’, prepared for ESCAPE (Enhanced Safety Coming from Appropriate Police Enforcement). It summarizes evidence concerning the incidence of non-compliance with traffic regulations and for the association between non-compliance and accidents. In both sections of this document, emphasis was put on presenting data from recent experience (such as GADGET project and other EU research) as well as on special analyses prepared by ESCAPE partners. There are currently three sources of information about the extent and distribution of non-compliance, all seriously limited in scope and accuracy. Observation-based traffic surveys of violations, surveys of drivers’ self-reported non-compliance and police records of detected traffic offences. External observations of traffic or driver behaviour are common to local projects or experiments dealing with specific measures. Continuous, systematic, and networkrepresentative observations of non-compliant traffic behaviour are presently less common. However, as the cases of seat-belt-use or drink-driving monitoring have demonstrated, data from reliable field observations ultimately provide the most valid measures of non-compliance. Self-reported violations are commonly associated with research into individual differences, the motivations underlying non-compliance and similar issues. Links between self-reported violations and non-compliance incidence and distribution, in actual traffic, are not clear or obvious. It is well recognized that police reported traffic violations are not only a small fraction of non-compliance acts committed, but are also a biased sample of violations, reflecting enforcement resources, strategies, priorities and constraints. Nevertheless, using any method reveals that at any given time large proportion of traffic moves in an illegal manner. The second section presents three lines of evidence for the relationship between noncompliance and accidents: Violations implicated in national accident records; Drivers’ violations and accidents records; Speeding and accidents on a road network. Violations do promote accidents but the links are neither deterministic nor very strong. (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