Can a bad day at work really affect how people drive? Could certain types of stress experienced during a working day, much like alcohol or extreme fatigue, turn someone into a riskier driver during their commute home?
I am collaborating with a team of engineers, telematics experts and researchers in London and the Netherlands on a project to examine exactly this.
Using data and telematics expertise provided by MyDrive Solutions and TrakM8, we have been investigating how having to closely control one’s behaviour at work, for example, by resisting more interesting distractions or impulses to maintain focus on work tasks, affects whether people are able to control their speeding behaviour on the way home. Speeding behaviour is a key contributing factor in road traffic crashes.
Our findings from a large pilot study, involving 80 regular commuters from the UK, offer full support for the idea.
We used online diaries recorded by drivers at different times during the day, coupled with telematics and GPS technology that tracked their speed, acceleration and braking on their route home.
On days when their work had required more self-control than usual, they were more likely to engage in risky driving behaviour on their way home. This is probably because people’s ability to maintain concentration is limited and, if used up at work, it is then harder to maintain concentration during driving. Importantly, the effects were observed even when we took into account the levels of fatigue reported by the driver.
This finding has potential implications for how we view the role of daily work stress as a risk factor for driving behaviour, alongside other known risk factors of alcohol, drug-use, fatigue and phone use.
Is this something that we simply accept as part of commuting? Or is it a serious problem that we might seek to tackle? And whose responsibility might it be to do so?
In my view, these are important questions for any employer who is interested in the welfare of their employees – especially those whose workforce tend to commute by car or drive significant amounts during their day. Insurers should naturally be interested in the more sophisticated insights that this methodology and findings provide, as will policy makers and even car manufacturers.
However, and very importantly, before we can be confident that we fully understand these effects, our project team needs to extend the research. More data is needed, collected in both the more controlled environment of laboratory driving simulators and again on the road using telematics.
Further research will help us to understand to what extent it is possible to generalise from these initial findings. It will also help us to understand what potential interventions, from awareness campaigns to new technology, might be effective in countering or preventing the negative effects of a bad day at work on our driving, and make our roads safer at peak times.
That is why our team is seeking new partners to contribute to this next phase of the research. In particular, we would like to identify partners who can offer access to laboratories with driving simulators or who have expertise in telematics and in-car video technology. We are also keen to find ways to recruit commuters who might be willing to participate in further field studies.
If you would like to find out more about the research, please contact Dr Mike Clinton, King’s Business School, King’s College London, michael.clinton@kcl.ac.uk.
