DriverMetrics Solutions Brochure

The course is suitable for practising road, fleet or health and safety managers or driving instructors who wish to develop their career by enhancing their skills and knowledge of the human factors in driving. The course is also suitable for students wishing to pursue a research career in road safety.

Whether it’s driving for leisure or work in specialist vehicles such as fire appliances, ambulances, police vehicles and trucks, human error is a frequent contributor to road traffic accidents.

If you have a professional interest in reducing the cost, environmental impact and risk of road traffic collisions, Cranfield’s MSc in Driver Behaviour will advance your understanding of the human factors in driving.

The first course of its kind to combine theoretical advances with practical demonstrations from leading experts in the Traffic Psychology field, the teaching programme of MSc, PgDip and PgCert offers qualifications in your field of work. You will cover modules concerned with the role of the driver educator in managing driver risk and human performance abilities and limitations. You will learn how to apply techniques for the prediction and reduction of driving error and deliver educational interventions according to driver needs.

The flexibility of both full-time and part-time options means that you can tailor the course to your own particular interests, the needs of your organisation and your career aspirations.

To achieve a PgCert qualification, students study the following modules:

• Introduction to Human Factors
• Human Performance and Error
• Driver Education
• Individual Differences in Driver Behaviour
• Influencing Driver Behaviour
• Driver Stress and Fatigue

To achieve a PgDip qualification, students study a further four modules:

• Research Methods and Statistics
• Cognitive Development and Driver Skill
• Drug and Drink Driving
• Road Traffic Accident Analysis

Students also submit a research-based report for the PgDip.

For the MSc, students undertake the above modules plus an independent research project which requires them to plan, execute, report and present a substantial thesis that contributes to knowledge in the field.

For further information, please contact us

Attendees will receive an update of the latest research followed by  a session on up and coming new features within the DriverMetrics® system and products. The day will end with a discussion on user requirements as we plan our next 12-month technical development and research programme.

Download the programme

 Please contact us to register your place.

If you are not a user of the Driver Risk Index™, request a free demo.

 The event has grown from strength to strength since the first conference held in Stratford upon Avon in 2003, followed by the ICDBT2 in Edinburgh in 2005, the ICDBT3 in Dublin in 2007 and the ICDBT4 Amsterdam in 2009. Year on year there has been an increase in attendance and the numbers of abstracts received as its reputation has grown amongst the academic and practitioner community. The conference programme contained an unprecedented number of good quality presentations and papers. The papers were organised into 20 parallel symposiums on topics such as young driver behaviour, eco-driving, mobile phones and driving, driver training, driving simulators, cyclists and rider training, at work driver risk and issues in the use of in-vehicle technology.

 A high calibre of contributors from over 60 academic institutions and road safety groups across the world delivered excellent cutting edge papers. Top researchers in the driver behaviour field delivered keynote addresses, including Professor Ian Glendon from the School of Psychology, Griffith University, Australia. His research interests are transportation psychology, driver stress/behaviour, safety/risk management, and safety culture/climate. His over 100 publications include five books. Professor Glendon delivered his paper on addressing potential risks facing young drivers. The second keynote speaker was Professor Michael Regan of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Professor Regan is an applied experimental psychologist with more than 20 years experience in transportation human factors research and gave his keynote address on the latest research in driver distraction, inattention, and human error.

The final keynote paper came from Dr Martin Langham talking about visual perception and crash investigation. Martin is Managing Director of User Perspective – a human factors research company based in the science park at the University of Sussex and has led over 200 research projects and over 30 forensic investigations on behalf of HM Government, police forces and the military working in the domains of counter terrorism, road, air, rail and marine transportation. Martin led the Human Factors investigation both on behalf of Lord Steven’s Operation Paget and on the later inquests into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Mr Dodi Al Fayed.

Selected papers will be published in the conference proceedings by Ashgate in 2012 in volume 5 of Driver behaviour and training.

In the video – available online – Lineker explains how many people underestimate the effects that alcohol has on their driving ability. These include slower reaction times and impaired judgement while out on the road. In addition, there’s no easy way of estimating how much of an effect alcohol has had on an individual as this varies from person to person. Contributing factors include age, individual weight, the type of drink consumed and how much food the driver has had.

Dr Lisa Dorn, has been working alongside ingenie to provide insight into the psychological factors that put young drivers at an increased risk of a crash. She said, “Young drivers are particularly at risk of having a crash under the influence of alcohol with the highest rate of drink-drive accidents per mile.” ingenie and Gary have also advised that designated drivers should stick to soft drinks all evening before taking on the responsibility of driving others home, and should also be aware of passengers who may have had too much to drink as they could cause a distraction whilst driving.

Using advanced telematics technology fitted with a high frequency motion sensor, ingenie monitors driving behaviour and builds a picture of an individual’s ‘driving DNA’, including hazard perception and attitude to risk. In doing so, it can reward safer drivers with cheaper insurance premiums.

West Midlands Fire Service are one of the largest UK services and Kevin talks about his experiences of implementing a behavioural approach to risk assessment and driver training.

For further information and demonstration passwords for the Emergency Fire Appliance Driver Risk Index™, please contact us.

 You can listen to the interview here (7m, 45s)

You can also read the transcript.

Based on a comprehensive research project involving hundreds of truck drivers from leading freight transport companies, the Truck Driver Risk Index™ is an evidence based behavioural risk assessment  developed specifically to identify truck driver risk. The resulting driver profile reports enable mangers and trainers to implement targeted, behavioural based interventions to reduce risk.

The Truck Driver Risk Index™ assesses drivers against situational, behavioural, coping and correction factors. The specific behavioural risk factors that are measured are: Patient Driving, Driving Excitement, Anxious Driving, Work Related Risk, Driving Fatigue, Impression Management, Driver Confidence,  Driving Concerns, Confrontation, Driving Focus and Self-evaluation.

 Please contact us if you would like to access the demonstration version of the Truck Driver Risk Index™.

Neil – Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about West Midlands Fire Service in terms of your fleet and the driver training operation that you have there.

Kevin – Personnel-wise we’ve got around about two thousand people in the brigade, frontline appliances around about sixty to sixty-five, and then we’ve got cars, up to about eighty different people responding in cars as well.

Neil – So it’s one of the largest fire services in the UK?

Kevin – It’s one of the largest ones now.

Neil – Could you tell us why did you you decided to go down the behavioural route in terms of assessing driver risk and driver coaching?

Kevin – Some number of years ago we heard Dr Lisa Dorn speaking at a national bluelight users conference and she was talking about the Driver Risk Index, following that we spoke to Lisa and several visits to ourselves as well, to the brigade to talk about us using it, our emergency fire appliance drivers, also an extension of the old-fashioned purely practical driver training. It was thought to be a good idea.

Neil – So really there’s two stages, there’s the EFADRI assessment itself and then there’s what you did to your training in terms of transforming your training. In terms of the EFADRI, how did it go about in terms of the research, research was all conducted at West Midlands Fire Service?

Kevin – Yes it was all conducted at what was then called the training centre, Julie Gandolfi attended the centre, interviewed fifty current EFAD drivers, emergency fire appliance drivers, different genders, quite a broad spectrum and age range as well, from around about twenty-two all the way up to about fifty-two, something like that. Obviously a lot of experience with some, very little experience with others, and Julie asked a set pattern of questions to everybody, no names were involved, it was all recorded and she then had to transcribe that and we also sent out questionnaires to about two hundred and fifty, something like that, EFAD drivers at the time we had quite a good response with that with the returns we had around about two-thirds of the forms returned, and that formed the basis of the information that the University required to start EFADRI.

Neil – What sort of issues did you find that were important in assessing EFAD driver’s risk, were there any particular issues that came out?

Kevin -Initially we thought it was all about attitude, their attitude towards other road users, whether people would get out of the way when they’re driving to incidents, whether our drivers would get annoyed or irritated and start responding in the wrong sort of way towards that. We were interested to see what the outcomes of the EFADRI would be, it’s been very interesting over the last few years that we’ve used it now, we’ve been using it as you said earlier since about 2006, I think we started using it. The way we’ve changed the course, the course has also changed since then, we now do a two week course which includes bluelight training as well, and we’ve been using the EFADRI on the initial courses which is the two week course, we’ve also been using it on refresher courses which come about every three years.

Neil – So how does it work, the driver is sent an EFADRI password in advance of the course?

Kevin – Today we’ve been doing it through the course, when they attend the training centre for the course. On the refresher course it’s up ‘till now anyway the first thing they’ve done when they’ve attended the course, and with the initial trainees it’s been during the second week of their course, once they’ve started actual blue light training, so we’re about to change the way we use it now to see if the feedback will be any different, because we use it during the training course, we may not be getting with all the people the true reflective response with the report, so we’re thinking now we’ll send it to them about three months after the initial course when they’ve been driving to incidents. For about three to four months, then we’ll see what the results are like, we have changed some of the things in the way we deliver the training. We talk a lot more now about behavioural and attitudinal aspects which we didn’t used to do before, so it’s made the course far more varied than it used to be.

Neil – How do the drivers react to doing an EFADRI, is it a positive experience for them?

Kevin – It is mostly nowadays, it was quite a lot of apprehension to begin with, it’s psychological and they seemed to think it was sort of pie in the sky stuff, some of them didn’t believe that it could be of any help to the actual driver training, but once you read the report which they don’t always agree with when they see their own report, once you read it and the instructors read it and go through it with them and explain what the report actually means then it’s generally positive then.

Neil – What about your driver trainers, how do they react to this transition from, I suppose a skills based approach to a skills plus behaviour?

Kevin – That was positive, all the instructors were positive, they wanted to be involved with it from the beginning, those that were there. There’s four of us still there and we were there right at the beginning of all this, and we’ve seen the progression of the EFADRI and we’ve also seen the progression of the way we’re doing the courses. We’ve also attended courses as instructors at the University so we know we’re getting more out, we know a lot more about what we’re talking about.

For further information and demonstration passwords for the Emergency Fire Appliance Driver Risk Index™, please contact us.

Research has shown that passing a practical driving test or course is not sufficient for a driver to be safe for life. Driver attitude and behaviour is known to be a major contributor to road traffic collisions. Drivers often hold distorted cognitions about their driving skills; believe they are less likely to be involved in an accident compared with their peers and may not consider they are at risk or need to change their driver behaviour. Driver trainers and people who manage driver risk at work often know little about how to manage these ‘human factors’ in driving – hence the development of this course.

Gaining knowledge about the human factors in driving is highly desirable for driver trainers and managers but being able to influence driver behaviour and attitude is even more crucial. To begin with, a standardized framework to address potential at-risk driver behaviour is unlikely to be effective unless the intervention is tailored to the individual driver. Cranfield University’s Driving Research Group has pioneered the use of driver psychometric profiling to understand the psychological and behavioural factors that might increase driver risk of being involved in a crash.

The Driver Risk Index™ (DRI) assesses risk of being involved in a crash from a number of different behavioural, attitudinal and emotional aspects. It measures situational and behavioural risk that are known to be predictive of driver behaviour, driver error and collision involvement. The findings from the research using the DRI have been reported in almost 40 academic publications.

This course will help you to understand the principles of the DRI and also develop some techniques designed to influence driver behaviour and attitudes. To do this requires good rapport skills with individual drivers. The only way to achieve this is to develop excellent self-awareness and personal insight first so that you can understand the way a particular driver thinks, feels and behaves.

On this course you will cover the fundamentals of psychometrics, personality and learning styles to give you an understanding of basic individual differences and how they might impact on the way people drive. You will be introduced to a Driver Coaching methodology to help you understand driver emotions, thinking patterns, behaviours.

Course objectives

To maximise driver trainer effectiveness by transferring coaching skills:

• To introduce the psychological principles behind driver education and assessment of driver risk
• to facilitate the effective coaching using the principles of behavioural change, learning styles and communication skills
• to understand the driver coaching process and demonstrate that understanding in the use of a structured Coaching Goals Plan

Contact us or visit the Cranfield website for  more information

Safety culture is the way in which safety is guided and managed in the workplace constructed with reference to the attitudes, behaviour, perceptions, and values, that employers and employees share in relation to safety (having technical, safe systems, human error and organizational policies/procedural aspects). Organizations with a positive safety culture are characterized by commitment to safety, shared care and concern for hazards and their impacts on people, realistic and flexible norms and rules about hazards, and reflection upon practice, highlighted by personal commitment, responsibility and mutual communication and trust (Guldenmund, 2000; Hudson, 2007).

Recently, research at Cranfield University has found that safety culture is linked to crashes when driving for work (Dorn, in press). Driver behaviour at work is affected by the company’s policies and practices and unwritten procedures which may be perceived as the manager’s general lack of understanding, or appreciation of driving situations including schedules, shift patterns, routes, traffic and increasing time pressure. A negative safety culture may be responsible for a stressful and unsafe work environment. Drivers’ are often driving tired, with sometimes difficult work relationships, with lack of assistance, driving under strict and unfeasible timelines, within urban or motorway traffic.

Organizations are required to do all that is reasonably practicable to reduce the risk of incidents and to assist you, we have provided a checklist of some of the main ways in which you can improve your safety culture and reduce your crash risk.

There are several ways in which your company can improve its safety culture over time. Here, we outline some of the basic policies, procedures and practices top be implemented as a priority.

Your obligations are to:

• Ensure that all people who drive a company vehicle are legally entitled to drive with a current valid licence and as far as practicable that anyone driving a company vehicle drives in a safe manner.
• Ensure so far as is practicable that all drivers are fit to drive.
• Assess and monitor driving standards and safety performance and strive for continual improvement.
• Ensure company vehicles are mechanically safe and any vehicle defects reported are rectified promptly.
  

Monitoring and Key Performance Indicators

Directors and managers are required to implement activities within their businesses that will reduce the number of traffic incidents. Evidence should be available to demonstrate your business is meeting its legal requirements and this can be achieved by monitoring road safety performance. Key performance indicators will allow good practice to be identified and assist in the introduction of improvements. There are many different ways of assessing KPIs and each business needs to determine which KPIs are most important. Common KPIs include number of at fault and part fault incidents, number of driving standards complaints, percentage of incidents investigated, percentage of alcohol/drug screening, and the percentage of high risk drivers in the business and how many are trained each year.

Driver Training

All businesses must drivers ensure their drivers are risk assessed. The Driver Risk Index™ provides an appropriate learning needs assessment to identify any specific learning needs that a driver might have. Each driver should receive an individual learning/coaching plan to work towards based on the DRI output. A programme of refresher coaching must be in place, and this should be compulsory for drivers who have had an at-fault incident, near miss or have had dangerous faults identified. Employees that have received complaints about their driving standard should also receive refresher training. Training and briefings must be recorded for auditing purposes.

Health

A number of latent health conditions may affect the ability of an employee to drive safely. In order to prevent problems and provide appropriate support to employees, it is recommended that medical screening arrangements are in place if management suspect that a health issue might affect safety. Drivers should also be required to inform their manager if they subsequently develop a health problem. A range of conditions can affect driving performance:

• Sensory and mobility problems: Eyesight, hearing, balance or other loss of mobility.
• Other conditions such as epileptic seizures, diabetes, fainting, heart conditions or sleep disorders.

Companies should actively promote safety on the roads and the importance of high standards of driving. Promotion of good driving standards may take many forms:

Passive messages to drivers include:-

• Use of notice-boards.
• Use of TV screens linked to a PC
• Poster campaigns.
• Newsletters.
• Road safety campaigns.
• Overall safety performance being publicised by celebrating success

Additionally campaigns about general driver responsibilities and seasonal campaigns based around the weather or road conditions may serve to increase awareness and reduce incident rates.

An active approach by supervisors and managers takes the form of courteous communication to drivers about the importance of driving safely.