The purpose of this state-of-the-art report is to review the existing literature concerning driver education and its safety effects. The purpose is also to point out some of the possibilities of driver education in the future, based on the scientific knowledge of today. A major part of the report deals with young drivers, their problems, and experience from educational measures for decreasing their high accident risk. The problems of these drivers are divided into three main groups: (1) Age-related problems, such as lifestyle, social norms etc; (2) Experience-related problems, such as cognitive overload, relations between formal and informal traffic rules etc, and (3) Young drivers' risk-taking and risk evaluation and the relation between subjective risk and subjective skill. Based on these three groups of problems, international experience of the safety effects of driver education is reviewed and discussed. Among these measures are graduated licensing, curfew rules, professional and private education, age limits for practising car driving and for licensing drivers, the role of secondary school for attitudes and norms etc. The conclusions are that young driver problems are not so much a matter of lack of knowledge and skill. They are merely a problem of cognitive overload and lack of experience on the one hand, and of age related matters, such as lifestyle, social norms and risk and evaluation, on the other. (A).
Samenvatting