Motivational determinants of control in the driving task

Abstract

Road transport is mainly about moving people and goods in motorised vehicles. Since the introduction of such vehicles in the nineteenth century, people have had the task of controlling them, although developments in technology today are moving rapidly towards the possibility of displacing the human element. For the time being, however, a human driver is in control and is faced at each moment on a journey with two fundamental choices, the direction in which to steer the vehicle (i.e., path choice) and the speed at which to move. In trying to understand how drivers make these choices, this paper will focus primarily on the choice of speed. Choice of speed is not only a much less constrained choice than choice of path (except in congested traffic) but it is choice of an inappropriate speed which contributes significantly to a very large proportion of collisions and road run-offs. As has frequently been written and perhaps all too frequently forgotten, driving is a self-paced task and it is the freedom of this self-pacing that underlies so much of what can go wrong. Despite the focus on speed choice here, however, choice of path or direction is not entirely neglected: The emerging understanding of the fundamental determinant of speed choice will be seen to apply equally well to choice of direction. © 2007 Springer-Verlag London.