Need Safer Taxi Drivers? Use Psychological Characteristics to Find or Train!

Kayvan Aghabayk,Leila Mashhadizade,Sara Moridpour

doi:10.3390/su12104206

Kayvan Aghabayk, Leila Mashhadizade + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12104206

Copy DOI

Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: May 20, 2020
Citations: 8	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Tehran, RMIT University

Abstract

Professional drivers play a key role in urban road network safety. It is therefore important to employ safer drivers, also find the problem, and train the existing ones. However, a direct driving test may not be very useful solely because of drivers’ consciousness. This study introduces a latent predictor to expect driving behaviors, by finding the relation between taxi drivers’ psychological characteristics and their driving behaviors. A self-report questionnaire was collected from 245 taxi drivers by which their demographic characteristics, psychological characteristics, and driving behaviors were obtained. The psychological characteristics include instrumental attitude, subjective norm, sensation seeking, aggressive mode, conscientiousness, life satisfaction, premeditation, urgency, and selfishness. Driving behaviors questionnaire (DBQ) provides information regarding drivers’ violations, aggressive violations, errors, and lapses. The standard linear regression model is used to determine the relationship between driving behavior and psychological characteristics of drivers. The findings show that social anxiety and selfishness are the best predictors of the violations; aggressive mode is a significant predictor of the aggressive violations; urgency has a perfect impact on the errors; and finally, life satisfaction, sensation seeking, conscientiousness, age, and urgency are the best predictors of the lapses.

Highlights

Road traffic accidents account for a high number of casualties, which can bring considerable economic and personal costs [1]
Disposition of behavior is represented by the psychological characteristics, outcome of behavior refers to the aberrant driving behavior, and consequences of behavior is associated with driving accidents [10,11]
The question is: Do psychological characteristics of drivers affect their driving? If the answer is yes, which driving behavior of drivers does each of their psychological characteristics affect? this study focuses on taxi drivers’ driving behavior and their psychological characteristics because taxis play a very important role in developing countries such as Iran

Summary

Introduction

Road traffic accidents account for a high number of casualties, which can bring considerable economic and personal costs [1]. About 1.35 million deaths and around 30 million non-fatal injuries occur all over the world due to crashes [2,3]. Accidents are one of the leading causes of injuries and deaths in developing countries [4,5]. The main cause of most occurring accidents is human factors, which, according to the previous studies, account for more than 90 percent [6,7]. A series of events can lead to an accident that includes disposition of behavior, outcome of behavior, and consequences of behavior. Disposition of behavior is represented by the psychological characteristics, outcome of behavior refers to the aberrant driving behavior, and consequences of behavior is associated with driving accidents [10,11]

Methods

Results

Conclusion