More than monitoring needed to decrease risky teenager driving behaviour

Monitoring teenaged drivers helps to increase the use of seatbelts, but decreasing more complicated behaviour like speeding and sudden braking poses more difficulty, researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found.
In the study, In-Vehicle Monitoring and the Driving Behaviour of Teenagers, the vehicles of 85 recently-licensed teenage drivers were outfitted with a monitoring device that detected all instances of sudden braking, sudden acceleration, speeding and non-use of seatbelts.
For each detected event, a detailed notification was transmitted via satellite to a central computer. Drivers were assigned randomly to one of four research groups. The groups differed in whether or not an alert sounded in the vehicle and whether or not parents were given access to Web sites containing notification records.
Researchers found that although seat belt use rates were high at the outset, they improved significantly when in-vehicle alerts were activated, the IIHS reported.
In-vehicle alerts and Web site notifications also were associated with reductions in instances of sudden braking/acceleration, but most reductions were not statistically significant, it continued.
“Electronic monitoring of teenage drivers can reduce the incidence of risky behaviour, especially seatbelt non-use, which declined in all treatment conditions,” the report said.
But more complicated behaviours were more difficult to change, researchers said.
“No consistent effects were achieved for sudden braking/acceleration for any treatment group,” the researchers reported. “Consistent reductions in speeding were achieved only when teenagers received alerts about their speeding behaviour, believed their speeding behaviour would not be reported to parents if corrected, and when parents were being notified of such behaviour by report cards.”