Researchers believe that perhaps one in four or five deaths can be reduced every year through specific crash avoidance training to younger drivers. Because a crash is a combination of unanticipated events and wrong or miscalculated decisions, the task is very complicated. New drivers must learn where to look and how to respond to the assessed risk.

Scanning is a practice of complicated eye movements unfamiliar to new drivers. New or inexperienced drivers tend to focus in one direction, usually the road in front of the vehicle. Scanning requires learning to search left and right on the roadway;  observe conditions directly in front of a vehicle and further down the road; and, rotate eye movement between side and rear-view mirrors—a complicated task.

Research and Study of New Drivers Crash Avoidance Training

“Research suggests that one of the reasons for this over-involvement is their failure to scan areas of the roadway for information about potential risks in situations that are hazardous, but not obviously so,” states Dr. Don Fisher, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He and other researchers explored the fact that younger drivers (18-21) are over-involved in crashes. 

An analysis of 2,000 police reports of accidents that involved licensed younger drivers between the ages of 16 and 19 years old indicates that the major contributor to crashes is the driver’s failure to scan the roadway for information that can reduce the driver’s risks (McKnight and McKnight, 2003).  Failures to do such were implicated in some 43% of the crashes.

The primary objective of their research project, RAPT, was to develop and evaluate a training program that addresses this failure. It was hypothesized that PC-based hazard anticipation training would increase the likelihood that younger drivers would scan for potential hazards on the open road.  In the RAPT project, training produced a 28.7% improvement overall while the trained drivers were still appropriately responding to only 60.6% of the risks in the near and far transfer scenarios.

It was also determined that more experienced drivers could  benefit as much, if not more, than those avoidance programs that were targeted solely for novice drivers. Recognizing how accidents are a combination of events, decisions, and changing influences may also be advantageous to repeat offenders and older experienced drivers.