Young drivers in road traffic
Young drivers are also novice drivers. We refer to 16 to 24 year old drivers as young novice drivers in this report. Young novice drivers are over-represented in crashes. This is true for all developed nations with mass motorization in which young people mostly start to drive as soon as they have reached the age limit for learning to drive. At its root, there are two causes for this over-representation in crashes: lack of mostly higher-order driving skills due to lack of experience; and risk-taking tendencies due to their young age. The age factor has two interrelated components: a biological component (i.e. having a brain which has not yet completely matured) and a social component (youth culture, lifestyle). Higher order driving skills include hazard perception, risk awareness, and calibration. Novice drivers do not always ‘see’ the potential hazards which are hidden in evolving traffic scenes when they drive; when they ‘see’ them they do not always assess risks properly, and they are also inclined to overestimate their skills. As a result, they sometimes tend to engage in driving tasks which exceed their still limited abilities. That is, their skills are poorly calibrated, such as driving too fast for the circumstances. Young drivers can also be more easily distracted, cannot always resist peer pressure, and are more often fatigued and they drive at night more often than older drivers. Drink driving occurs almost as often with young drivers than with older ones, but it has a more devastating effect on their driving capabilities. Although they do not drink and drive more often, they do drive more often under the influence of illegal psychoactive substances such as cannabis. What also contributes to their higher risk is that they drive more often in older cars with less safety features than in new cars, and drive more often in circumstances which are difficult for all drivers, such as driving at night and driving with peers. In general, young male drivers have a higher crash risk than young female drivers but only in relation to the most severe crashes.
Countermeasures
Given the severity of the problem, EU Member States have taken action, to varying degrees, to reduce young novice driver risk. There is no panacea that will resolve the problem entirely because driving skills tend to be impaired by a lack of experience and risk-taking tendencies are prevalent due to their young age. Moreover, not all young novice drivers are the same. There is evidence that the following measures can be effective:
- More emphasis on higher-order skill training in driving licence systems such as hazard perception and risk awareness training.
- The inclusion in driving licence systems of a learner phase (driving while accompanied by an older more experienced driver) and an intermediate phase where young drivers are allowed to drive independently but with restrictions such as not driving with peers, not driving in the dark, and not with devices which can distract such as mobile phones even when they are ‘hands-free’.
- A low BAC limit for young drivers provided it is thoroughly enforced.
