ALTHOUGH MANKIND has been driving for more than 100 years, piloting a motor vehicle remains an inherently foreign environment. The human brain was not designed and certainly hasn’t yet evolved to cope with speeds faster than a person can run.
Hard-wired into our make-up is the well-known “fight or flight” mechanism that kicks in whenever we are faced with a panic or potentially dangerous event. However, when such events are occurring at 50 or 60km/h, and even more so at 100km/h, these essential responses simply become overwhelmed with the number of inputs and the speed they arrive. The human brain is incapable of processing these messages and sending appropriate instructions to the body quickly enough. The inevitable response is that we freeze, or make poorly considered, instinctive decisions. And sadly, instinct in a motor vehicle is quite often exactly the opposite of the action we should have taken.
Not surprisingly, 93% of all traffic incidents are the result of human error.
This tendency for humans to freeze has been well documented by military organisations where long periods of inactivity and boredom can be punctuated by short spells of extreme and rapid action. The method the military takes to overcome this problem is to instil a series of automated responses (conditioned reflexes) through repetition until an individual responds to a given threat automatically, virtually without having to think about it.
The New York Police Department has 36,000 officers. In 2006, there were 60 instances where officers had to fire their weapons in response to a threat. So, each New York police officer faces a one in 600 chance that he or she will be involved in a shooting incident in any given year (using 2006 figures). One would suggest one in 600 is a low probability, but NYPD officers are required to undergo regular firearms and threat response training to reinforce their conditioned reflexes and override their natural tendency to freeze. Airline pilots undergo the same kind of conditioned reflex training to ensure they will react instinctively in an emergency that most are unlikely ever to face.
It is pretty clear that driving a motor vehicle puts all of us into a similar situation to some of the high-risk professionals in the military or flying aeroplanes – long periods of boredom (especially when travelling long distances, on good roads, at unnecessarily low speeds) and mundane tasks, occasionally punctuated by short periods of unexpected stress when the driver is required to make rapid decisions based on a multitude of inputs.
So, how do we train people to drive? We concentrate on the mundane, mechanical aspects of operating a vehicle. Our current system of driver training actually develops conditioned reflexes that may be totally inappropriate in emergencies.
Still using 2006 US figures (the latest I was able to source, Australian figures were unobtainable), each vehicle in the US faced a one in 48 chance of being involved in a collision of some description. That means an American driver is 12 times more likely to be in a potential crash than a New York police officer has of having to fire a weapon.
Advanced driver training, properly applied, rewires our conditioned reflexes under certain conditions so that we are better equipped to handle emergencies. It should also train drivers to recognise high risk situations and take pre-emptive avoiding action, and refine typical driving behaviour, including reducing bad habits. A driver properly trained should be constantly and subconsciously running through “what if” scenarios while driving – “what if that driver doesn’t stop at the red light, what if that pedestrian steps off the kerb, what if there’s a child behind that parked car”.
Advanced driver training also provides the opportunity to experience the dynamics of a vehicle in a controlled and safe environment – “how does it feel when a vehicle is about to lose traction, what does it feel like when two wheels drop off the bitumen, how does a car respond under panic braking”. Most drivers never get to experience these situations until it becomes a life-or-death occurrence, when the consequences of a wrong decision, based on lack of experience or knowledge, can be fatal. On the other hand, having experienced them before, when such a situation arises in the real world conditioned reflexes kick in and the driver is less likely to panic and more likely to take the appropriate action.
One of the criticisms of advanced driver training, especially when applied to younger drivers, is that it can lead to overconfidence and more aggressive driving. This is difficult to prove or disprove, but if we apply it teaching children how to swim, it becomes clear how silly it is. Should we not teach a child to swim because it may become overconfident, and so swim too far from shore and get into difficulties? A naturally aggressive driver who attends a course may be shown the error of his (or less often, her) ways; at worst he or she will simply become a more knowledgeable aggressive driver.
The possibility of being involved in some form of car crash is considerably higher than many of us imagine. If airline pilots and police officers invest hundreds of hours training to handle a situation statistically far less probable than any of us being involved in a car crash, surely we should take every precaution to maximise our skills, improve our attitude and alert ourselves to the very real dangers.