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To Stephen G Stradling,and Michelle L Meadows

Early in your paper you describe 3 aspects or phases of learning in driving: technical mastery in controlling the vehicle; reading the road (anticipating, etc.) and then the “expressive phase”.

Then later on you make the following statement:

“Thus bad attitudes make for bad drivers. And these findings call into question the conventional wisdom that road traffic accidents arise solely as a result of lack of skill on the part of drivers, and thus that the most effective way to reduce the number of accidents is to provide better training or remedial retraining in driver skills.”

Does this imply that “driving skills” applies only to those techniques learned in the first phase?

Skill and attitude must be separated. As stated "some skilful drivers choose to drive in a risky manner"

A good example of this can be seen on the race track. If we assume that by being there all the drivers are skilful, we also know that there is risk involved. There can be observed a wide spectrum of attitude from the win at all costs to the fair and considerate. The attitude having major bearing on the "survivability" of the driver.
"There's old drivers and there's bold drivers, but there ain't no old bold drivers"

I am from Holland myself and it disturbs me that instead of teaching young people how to handle a car and fellow members on the road, they teach young people how to avoid major catastrophe and total mayhem on the roads.

I just mean to say that when a new driver is not even teached the basics of driving anymore but really just the surviving skills on the road we are a long way from creating a safer environment for our children.

I hope that one day we can go back to enjoy driving and see something more from our lovely planet instead of wreckage and disaster.

In my message above I focus on “driving skills” because I feel that this is an important concept when it comes to developing measures to reduce aggressive driving. In driving, we seem to restrict the concept of skill to physical handling of the vehicle. However, in other fields we hear about “social skills”, “communication skills,” “tactical skills.” Perhaps if we extended our notion of driving skills we would find a role for training and education in providing a solution to aggressive driving.

I favor a definition of aggressive driving which includes anything that drivers do that pushes beyond the bounds or norms of acceptable behavior, whether that be hostile behavior or something as simple as sneaking along on the shoulder of the road to get to your turn-off when the traffic is jammed. But what are these norms?

I agree with Marcus that we focus too much on the ultimate failure in driving - the crash. Perhaps if we shifted our attention to everyday driving we would see different kinds of research. In the modern traffic mix, I do not see that there are well established norms of behavior or skill (physical or otherwise) for road users to relate to. Novice driver training leaves us with very basic skills, rules and protocols, but there’s a lot more to driving than that. Drivers may be aggressive for reasons that have nothing to do with traffic, but hostility or aggression may also be triggered by behavior a driver considers to be wrong and which may not be. What is wrong or aggressive to one driver may not be to another. Drivers are often badly mistaken about their rights or what is legal and illegal.

The paper mentions that drivers are often angered by the “bad behavior” of others. A better understanding of the driving task, and knowledge of an expanded concept of driving skill, would surely help. By acting as a basis for commonly understood norms, it might at least alleviate some of the perceived aggression and help isolate the more extreme forms.

Figure 4 suggests that self-reported aggressive violations for females between the ages of 17 and 40 do not differ substantially from those of males. Are there qualitative differences in the types of aggressive violations reported by both genders? Previous studies suggest that males are more likely to engage in behaviours that we would describe as "road rage" Is this the case?

Dan Keegan:
The answer to your question is, of course, 'Well, yes and no'!

Our contention is that the term 'driving skill' has been largely used to denote the behaviours in our first phase -- technical mastery of vehicle handling. What race drivers and rally drivers have in abundance. What (young and not so young) male drivers enthuse about ("Hmm, neat shift!", 'Nice line through the bend!"). What you learn during initial training and practice -- and what initial instruction and initial driving test have tended to concentrate on, rightly so because it comes first, is a necessary -- though not a sufficient -- condition for safe and enjoyable driving, but wrongly so in so far as it suggests that achieving technical mastery completes your training as a driver.

And 'skill' has positive connotations -- it's a good thing.

But, we would argue, there is considerable 'skill' involved in reading the road right -- learning to predict the likely decisions, actions and trajectories of other road users in order to avoid intersecting trajectories -- and that it also makes sense to talk of the skillful -- and safe -- realisation of the expressive components of driving.

So: Yes, 'skill' in driving has been usually used to refer to vehicle handling but No, it should be used in a wider sense.
--Stephen G Stradling