Study of drivers’ salient beliefs and intention to comply with speed limits on urban roads

Abstract

Many drivers select their driving speed based mainly on their perceptions of conditions that make them feel safe but which do not always correspond to reality. Consequently, it is of fundamental importance to identify the most commonly held beliefs and the drivers’ intention regarding the speed limit to define policies which efficiently and effectively reduce the number of traffic accidents and their severity. Against that background this paper presents a study of drivers’ salient beliefs and intention to comply with the legal speed limit on urban roads, based on a sample of 914 licensed drivers in the Federal District, Brazil. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was used together with an expanded number of explicative variables for intention. The research showed that, in the situation analyzed, intention is explained by constructs of attitude towards the behavior, perceived behavioral control, and prior behavior (with and without the respective interactions) and also by the variables driver age and gender. Two analyses investigated the strength of drivers’ beliefs in explaining each one of the TPB constructs. Analysis 1 considered belief factors that were specific for attitude, subjective norm and control constructs. Analysis 2 grouped all the beliefs analyzed into general factors capable of explaining the variability of the TPB constructs. The results showed that the factors obtained from Analysis 2 provide a better explanation of the variations observed in the direct measurements of the TPB constructs than those obtained from Analysis 1.