Les erreurs des conducteurs âgés

Abstract

In the area of road safety, the elderly population is widely recognised as being of topical concern. This group is increasingly present on the roads and a number of questions have been raised concerning their accident-proneness. The issues relate to their driving skills — or even their aptitude to drive — as well as possible measures which could be implemented to help them perform the driving task. But apart from relatively general data on the problems they face, little is known about the specific nature of their difficulties and driving errors, nor about the scenarios of the accidents they are involved in. We have undertaken in-depth research to improve our understanding in this area, using detailed data gathered by multidisciplinary teams at accident scenes. The present paper describes this analysis of road traffic accidents and compares the accident mechanisms for a sample of 57 senior drivers (aged over 60 years) to those for a sample of 335 younger drivers. Using a model developed in the course of earlier research (Van Elslande et al., 1997), (Van Elslande, 2000), it presents a comparative analysis of the functional breakdowns (or errors) that affect the different groups of drivers and describes the explanatory factors for these breakdowns and the contexts in which they occur. The main results demonstrate that certain types of error are more typical of elderly drivers than of younger drivers (e.g. failures in perception and assessment, exceeding of cognitive capacities). They also underline the complexity of the underlying phenomena. Lastly, they provide grounds for questioning the hypothesis that the accident mechanisms found among this population are homogeneous.