The road to disaster

We've been reminded of shocking statistics like these this week following the tragic deaths on Monday of four teenage boys near Banff as they travelled together to college on the first day of term. Only three weeks previously four Lanarkshire teenagers, again all boys, died instantly when their car smashed into a tree near Linlithgow.

Of course, it is too early to draw any conclusions about the driving skills or attitudes of the young men involved in these particular accidents. However, successive studies have uncovered an alarming gap between young men's perceptions of their driving abilities and the objective truth.

In fact, there is such concern about them that the Scottish Road Safety Campaign has sponsored a project looking at how to help young drivers survive their first year on the road.

Though aimed at all inexperienced drivers, their main concern is with young men.

A recent study from the AA Foundation for Road Safety Research shows why. ''Men look for thrills behind the wheel; women seek independence,'' says Professor Frank McKenna, the psychologist who led the study. ''And although anecdotal evidence may suggest otherwise, women are not starting to drive as aggressively as men.''

McKenna found that inexperienced young men take more risks than any other group: ''They believe that fast reaction times will keep them out of trouble but the truth is that

they are slow to anticipate hazards,'' says McKenna.

Here are some of the key findings:

n Teenage men are twice as likely as teenage women to be involved in bend accidents. Such accidents are often linked with speed.

n Young men are also twice as likely to be involved in overtaking accidents.

n Nearly half of all accidents involving young male drivers happen after dark.

n Women are only more likely than men to have accidents at junctions, especially when turning right.

n A study of young drivers showed that the majority adopted a gap of fewer than two seconds from the car in front.

n Though younger drivers as a group are more likely to avoid alcohol when driving, a small minority of young men drink excessively before driving.

The reasons for younger men having so many more accidents than either younger women or older men appears to have less to do with lack of skill than a certain attitude.

An earlier study had already shown that a substantial minority (about 35%) of young male drivers can be categorised as ''unsafe''. A second AA Foundation report - Safe and Unsafe - a comparative study of younger male drivers - involved conducting in-depth interviews with individuals from both categories.

They found that typically ''safe'' drivers had regular girlfriends, while ''unsafe'' ones spent more time with male friends. This turns out to be a key factor because separate studies have shown that young men drive more slowly when carrying older adults or girlfriends as passengers and faster when the others in the car are other young men.

The ''unsafe'' drivers were more likely to be enthusiastic about driving and the car culture and, crucially, though aware of the risks they take, they believed themselves to be highly skilled and safe drivers.

The ''unsafe'' drivers also admitted to driving more aggressively and taking more risks if they were in a bad or angry mood.

Matthew Joint, a behavioural analyst working for the AA, says: ''There seems to be something about the car as an environment which encourages some young men to express themselves in a particularly aggressive way. They may be thwarted or frustrated in other parts of their lives but they regard their cars as a little territory on four wheels. This personal space gives them a sense of power and invulnerability when they are driving.''

They are more likely to be self-centred and thrill seekers, who think their reaction times are much quicker than they are, says Joint. Often their love of speed is fuelled by an interest in motorsport, car adverts emphasising speed, and motoring magazines like Max Power.

Paul McCormick, a chartered civil engineer who works for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, believes much of the fault lies with the British driving test: ''Most young people regard the test as just a little hurdle. They feel very safe in their metal shells but, unfortunately, they are more vulnerable. We know that new drivers have poor hazard perception. That is shown by the number of novice

drivers involved in single vehicle accidents on country lanes. We'd like a much more stringent test.''

Compulsory probationer plates, different speed limits for new drivers, limits on the power-to-weight ratio of vehicles driven by new drivers (as with motorcycles), and the use of log books recording the new driver's experience of night driving, motorway driving, urban driving, and the like, are among the options being considered.

''We need a staged driving test in which people move up to a full licence step by step, then possibly start to move down after the age of 60,'' says McCormick.

The British School of Motoring takes a similar view. Their spokesman, Martin Arnold, says: ''We've got a test introduced in 1935, which hasn't basically changed, except for the introduction of the theory test. There should be much more about hazard perception and driver attitude.

''In a half-hour test it's very easy to hide an aggressive driving technique. The personality of the driver would show through much better in a hour-long test.''

Offering new drivers optional courses to improve their skills,

simply doesn't work, he says, because those most likely to need it are least likely to come forward: ''We offered motorway driving courses free and still some people didn't turn up for them.

Fiona Murray, director of the

Scottish Road Safety Campaign, takes a different view. Hedging

new drivers around with restrictions doesn't get to the nub of the problem, she says.

''You can restrict new drivers to small-engine cars but even they can go fast and you don't need to be travelling that fast to wrap yourself round a tree. People talk of curfews but the practicalities and enforcement would be so difficult.''

Rather than that, the campaign is working on challenging the attitudes of young male drivers: ''They have

an unrealistic assessment of their own skills. They feel quite invulnerable. That's what we need to tackle,''

she says.

The campaign has sponsored the ''New Driver Project'' at Stirling University, where psychologists are developing an early intervention programme to convince new drivers of how vulnerable they are.

As Matthew Joint of the AA observes: ''Hang-gliding, bungee-jumping? By comparison those things are safe. These guys don't realise that jumping in the car to go to the shops or see their mates is probably the most dangerous thing they will ever do.''