Aberrant driving behaviors as mediators in the relationship between driving anger patterns and crashes among taxi drivers: An investigation in a complex cultural context
Objective
Taxis have become an integrated component of Qatar’s urban transportation network due to their convenience, comfort, and flexibility. Qatar has seen an uptick in the demand for professional taxi drivers. Most Qatari taxi drivers come from developing countries with poor awareness of road safety; therefore, they regularly engage in aberrant driving behavior, leading to traffic violations and crashes. For taxi rides to be safer, it is essential to determine the association between driving aberration and road traffic crashes (RTCs), with an emphasis on the underlying factors that trigger these behaviors.
Methods
To this end, we collected the data from taxi drivers relying on standard questionnaires, namely the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) and the Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ), together with the real crash data of the same taxi drivers obtained from the police department. We relied on factor analysis to identify the main factors of these tools and then structural equation modeling to predict their causal relationship with RTCs.
Results
The results indicated that the component of DAS, namely “illegal driving”, triggered all dimensions of aberrant driving behaviors, whereas hostile gestures had a positive correlation with lapses. In addition, the factor “error” was identified as a significant direct predictor, while the factor “illegal driving” was identified as a significant indirect predictor for RTCs. Regarding demographic characteristics, professional driving experience was found to be negatively associated with RTCs.
Conclusion
Driving aberration mediated the impact of driving anger on RTCs. The findings from this study could help road safety practitioners and researchers better understand these relations. In addition, these results could also be very helpful for driving instructors to train taxi drivers in a way to cope with provoking situations.
Other Information
Published in: Traffic Injury Prevention
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2023.2199898
Funding
Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.
History
Language
- English
Publisher
Taylor & FrancisPublication Year
- 2023
License statement
This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Institution affiliated with
- Qatar University
- College of Engineering - QU
- Qatar Transportation and Traffic Safety Center - CENG
- College of Arts and Sciences - QU