|
| A small carrot beats the big stick. |
At any rate, it is in this chapter that we will demonstrate that it is possible to motivate people to adopt a safer behaviour repertoire under real-life conditions, and that accident rates per person can be greatly reduced. The target level of risk--in other words, the level of risk at which people prefer to operate--can be reduced by interventions in four categories of tactics. Thus, the safety measure may aim to:
Increase the perceived benefit of cautious behaviour..........Tactic A.
Decrease the perceived cost of cautious behaviour.............Tactic B.
Increase the perceived cost of risky behaviour................Tactic C.
Decrease the perceived benefit of risky behaviour.............Tactic D.
As examples of Tactic A, one might think of instituting administrative rewards for accident-free and violation-free driving through discounts in insurance premiums, free licence renewal, discounts in vehicle permits and medical insurance premiums, rewards for being healthy, discounts for people with appropriate health habits. Examples of Tactic B might be the institution of flexitime so that the need to rush to work will be reduced, subsidies for public transportation, enhancing the efficiency and comfort of public transit, tax exemptions on safety equipment, making safety equipment more pleasant to use. Using Tactic C, the perceived cost of risky behaviours may be enhanced by actions such as increased taxes on tobacco, increased penalties for traffic violations, building vehicles that become uncomfortable (noisy and vibrating) when driven at high speeds, manufacturing vehicles with frail exteriors and crashworthy interiors which would increase repair costs but reduce the severity of injury, reduction of the right to restitution for damages incurred by individuals who don't wear a seatbelt, reduced sick pay for employees who were not complying with safety rules and regulations at the time of their accidents. Finally, Tactic D might be the rationale for measures such as paying taxi drivers per time unit instead of per kilometre, making it mandatory that all employees involved in risky work be paid by the hour and not per unit of productivity.
A word of warning! The above examples are meant to illustrate and are not necessarily recommended. Many of them would likely fail to produce lasting reductions in the rate of accidents or lifestyle-dependent poor health. This is because they are directed at particular behaviours, such as speeding, drinking and driving, or smoking tobacco. They do not, in themselves, stimulate the desire to be safe and in good health. If you tax alcohol beyond people's financial reach, they may try making the stuff themselves, with the potential for much greater damage to health due to poisoning. To increase the likelihood of being stopped for a traffic violation is to increase surrogate risk. This may motivate drivers to avoid a penalty, but does not heighten the desire to be safe; neither does it reduce the accident rate (see Chapter 8).
Countermeasures that are oriented towards specific behaviours instead of towards the outcome--having, or not having, an accident--do not prevent behavioural adaptation from occurring. Those who fail to realize this suffer from the delta illusion. Reduction in the frequency of one particular immediate accident cause may simply make room for other immediate causes to become more prominent.
Years ago, this phenomenon was referred to as equifinality.[1] The same final outcome, for instance, the accident rate per person-hour, may emerge although the pathways are different. Sobriety is no guarantee of safety; neither is driving at the average speed. Abstinence is no guarantee of health; neither is jogging. Similarly, accidents may be avoided and safety achieved through a variety of different behaviours.
Instead of increasing police surveillance and thereby the likelihood of detection, one might consider increasing the penalty for the offence. Such action, however, may take insufficient account of the social context in which the law has to operate. Drinking and driving is folk crime; large segments of the population admit to it. Of nearly 10,000 Canadian drivers surveyed, 72% reported they had been driving after drinking at least once during the 12 months preceding the interview, while 22% said they had been driving while "high" on alcohol during that period. Analogous American statistics indicated 60% and 29%, respectively. Canadian roadside surveys found as many as 6% of all passing drivers to have BACs over the legal limit. And prior to the introduction of the statutory BAC limit in the Netherlands, the percentage of night-time drivers exceeding this limit varied between 13% and 17%. Between two and four o'clock in the morning, these percentages were no less than between 31% and 36%. Roadside surveys are conducted over a few hours only, during a few days. One wonders what percentage of drivers exceed the legal limit at least once a year.
It is one thing to declare a frequently committed act a crime, but quite another to treat it as such on the level of police enforcement and court action. Can it be surprising that police officers are hesitant to charge, that defence lawyers find many grounds for clemency, that juries are reticent in passing a guilty verdict, and that judges, very serious cases excepted, tend to refrain from severe sentences?
In what is known as the "Chicago Crackdown" on drunk driving, judges in that city agreed to impose a seven-day jail sentence on all persons deemed guilty of the offence, but in a period of six months, only 6% of over 6,000 drivers arrested for driving under the influence had actually received such a sentence. In New York State it was found that about 27% of all individuals arrested for violations including driving under the influence were never prosecuted.[3]
It would seem that a law cannot be enforced if its strictness exceeds popular opinion about the immorality or deviancy of the act concerned. The approach that takes the form of punishing people for specific unsafe acts suffers from several other problems as well, some of which have been identified in the context of organizational psychology.[4]
First, there is the self-fulfilling effect of attribution: labelling people with undesirable characteristics, and expecting that they will show them unless kept in check by the threat of punishment, may cause individuals to behave as if they had these characteristics. To illustrate this by its classic example: suppose you pretend that a perfectly solvent bank is about to go bankrupt (your attribution), and that you spread that rumour. The rumour you spread may cause depositors to withdraw their funds, with the end effect that the bank develops solvency problems and ends up by going bankrupt. Similarly, the very imposition of a speed limit may provoke some people to drive faster than they otherwise would. It is well known that some drivers find pleasure in activating the electronic devices installed along highways that tell the speeding driver: "You are going too fast".
Second, the emphasis is on "process controls", or specific behaviours (such as using a piece of safety equipment or obeying the speed limit), instead of focusing on the outcome of safety. Process controls are cumbersome to design and implement. Prohibitive process controls do not clearly communicate what course of action should be taken instead. Research on traffic signs has clearly indicated that prohibitive signs such as "no left turn" have less of a guiding effect upon drivers' decision making than signs that tell them what turns are allowed, i.e., permissive signs.[5] In passing, we may note that, although they are not more conducive to safety, the near-universal use of prohibitive signs may be due to the fact that they make it easier to establish blame when they are not heeded. Moreover, process controls cannot effectively cover all undesirable specific behaviours in any situation. Roadside observation of driving speeds on an urban expressway in Montréal, for example, has shown that the ratio of incidences of drivers speeding by at least 10 km/hr over the posted limit relative to the number of charges laid for speeding was in the order of 7,000-to-one.[6] Similar and even higher ratios have been found elsewhere.[7] And, in Canada, it has been estimated that about 25,000 km of driving with blood alcohol levels over the legal limit are accumulated for every charge that is laid for this offence. During the same time period in which this study was done, the impaired kilometrage per charge was about 136,000 kms in the Netherlands and 150,000 kms in France.[8]
Punishment brings negative side effects; one of these is a dysfunctional social climate, a climate of resentment, uncooperativeness, antagonism, sabotage. As a result, the very behaviour that was to be prevented may in fact be stimulated. Punishment may increase the inclination to beat the system. It has been estimated that between 40% and 70% of drivers whose licences have been suspended or revoked continue to drive. American, Dutch and Swedish studies found that the longer the period of disqualification, the more likely that the driver will continue to drive without a licence.[9]
A Swedish investigator compared drivers who had obtained a relatively severe sentence for driving while under the influence, with another group who had received relatively light punishment. The heavily punished drivers were found to be more likely to repeat the offence! This is not so surprising if one realizes that the likelihood of being caught for the offence is very small. The ones unlucky enough to get caught know that, too, and feel unfairly treated by a system of arbitrariness. Their resentment may be further fed by factors such as long time delays between the traffic incident and the announcement of suspension. Thus, they become even more antagonistic towards authority and the law of the land. These hostile feelings may not only overshadow any feelings of guilt and shame, but create a state of mind that is incompatible with effective re-education and rehabilitation. Some convicted Swedish drivers went as far as complaining that the state had committed a crime against their person.[10]
In the mid-1970s an innovative and relatively large-scale experiment was conducted in California.[13] The Division of Highways in that state contacted 9,971 drivers who had caused collisions or committed violations in the previous year and, thus, had incurred recent demerit points. These drivers were informed by letter that they would receive a free 12-month extension to their driver's licence on the condition that they achieve a clean record during the coming year. Apart from the financial incentive, amounting to a few dollars per year, this offer also implied deferral of the obligation to submit oneself again to the written part of the driver's examination, which, in California, is administered repeatedly throughout a driver's career.
A control sample of another 9,976 drivers was not approached in this manner, but they too were followed up, along with the experimental group, over a period of several years. The findings include the following: In the first follow-up year, there were significantly fewer accident-involved drivers in the experimental group, particularly among the younger drivers and among those drivers whose licence renewal was to come up within one year after receipt of the letter. In this latter group, the accident rate was 22% lower than in the appropriate controls. The drivers who actually earned the bonus after one year showed 33% fewer accidents in the second follow-up year than did the controls.
More recently, a report was published about a long-lived incentive project in Germany that has not, as yet, received the amount of attention that it deserves from the road safety community. Professional drivers employed by the German branch of Kraft Foods Corporation, with a fleet of about 600 trucks and vans, were told in 1957 that they would receive a bonus of 350 Deutschmark for every half year of driving without culpable accidents, that is, without accidents in which they were judged to be at fault.
In the first year after the initiation of this incentive scheme, the frequency of culpable accidents per 100,000 km driven fell abruptly by about one-third, and subsequently continued to drop more smoothly; in 1981, the accident rate per km amounted to about 14% of what it had been in 1956, prior to the programme. The rate of all accidents, culpable or not, fell to 25% of what it had been in 1956. The direct financial accident costs per km driven showed a steeper decline than the accident frequency per km driven. This indicates that the incentive programme was particularly effective in reducing the occurrence of more serious accidents. The total implementation costs of the programme were estimated at some $ 35,000 U.S. per annum, but these costs are reported to be far outweighed by the reduction in insurance fees resulting from the much-improved safety record.[14] This programme has been in force for over three decades without showing signs of waning effectiveness.[15] An American team-based incentive programme addressed at transit bus operators yielded a 25-35% reduction in accident rates as compared to randomly selected controls within the same company. The ratio between programme costs and benefits was estimated at almost seven-to-one. After the programme was withdrawn, the safety records of the incentive group dropped to a level that was still better than that of the no-treatment employees, but no longer significantly so.[16]
The effectiveness of incentives programmes in enhancing safety has been very clearly established.[17,18] In a recent review of over 120 published evaluations of different types of occupational accident prevention, incentives were generally found to be more effective in enhancing safety than were engineering improvements, personnel selection and other types of intervention (including disciplinary action, special licensing, and exercise and stress reduction programmes).[19] Reductions in accidents per person-hour of between 50% and 80% of the base rate are not uncommon in manufacturing, construction and other industries.
The degree of cost-effectiveness of any accident countermeasure is naturally of great interest to those who are responsible for such programmes. These are often expressed as benefit/cost ratios: the amount of money saved through the programme divided by the money needed to run it. This can be calculated and constitutes a benefit over and above the reduction in human pain and suffering, which are more difficult to quantify in monetary terms. The ratios are usually greater than two-to-one, while any ratio greater than one means that the company is making money on the accident prevention effort. The economic attractiveness of incentive plans is largely due to discounts in fees payable to workers' compensation boards and other insurance; companies with favourable safety ratings pay lower insurance premiums.
These favourable effects continue to last over time. Incentive plans in two American mines were studied over periods of 11 and 12 years, respectively. In one mine the number of days lost due to accidents was reduced to about 11% of baseline, and in the other to about 2%. From year to year, benefit/cost ratios varied between 18 and 28 at one mine and between 13 and 21 at the other. There was no sign that the effectiveness of the incentive plans diminished over time at either mine.[20] A benefit/cost ratio as high as about 23-to-one has been observed for incentives for safety in the resort hotel business.[21]
Incentive programmes generally meet with approval from the people to whom they are addressed, and in this respect they compare favourably with the much less popular action of the law and of the police. To put it popularly: a small carrot is not only much better liked than a big stick, it is also much more effective. Only one negative side effect that has been noticed so far, and that is the tendency of people to under-report accidents when incentive programmes are in effect. Fortunately, however, in a review of some 25 published reports on incentive programmes, such under-reporting has been found to occur with respect to minor accidents only.[22]
Merely engaging in the risky act of driving was economically discouraged in another case. As a consequence of the elimination of Connecticut state subsidies for driver education in high schools, nine school boards decided to drop the courses from the curriculum, while others continued to offer them. Obtaining a driver's licence thus became more expensive. Subsequently, the total number of licensed years of 16- and 17-year-olds diminished by 18% in the communities that eliminated high-school driver education, as compared with 7% in communities where this education was retained. The former communities showed a 27% decrease in the traffic accident rate of 16- and 17-year-olds, in comparison with 7% in the other communities. These figures may be calculated from graphs in a report on the Connecticut experience.[24] In passing, you may notice that the reduction in crash rate was considerably greater than the reduction in the number of young drivers who obtained high-school driver education. Once again, one wonders if this type of "education" lulls its graduates into an illusion of safety and thus leads them to behave more dangerously (see Sections 6.2 and 6.3).
An effort has been made to cull the ingredients of the most effective incentive plans from the various published reports.[26,27,28] This has, by necessity, been an effort largely based on inference, because to date there are no well-controlled experiments in which one particular incentive characteristic is being varied and all other factors are kept constant. For obvious reasons, such experiments are not likely to be forthcoming either; industry is not in the business of running such experiments. Yet, the items that appear in the checklist below would seem to make very good sense.
Managerial vigour. The introduction and long-term maintenance of incentive programmes should be conducted with managerial vigour, commitment and coherence. Workers or drivers should not only be informed of the programme in existence, but they should also frequently be reminded of it in attention-catching ways. In order to motivate and to inform the relevant audience, those in charge of incentive programmes should provide clear and frequent knowledge of results to the audience.
Rewarding the bottom line. Incentive programs should reward the outcome variable (the fact of not having caused an accident), not some process variable like wearing the seatbelt, driving when sober, obeying the speed limit. This is because rewarding specific behaviours does not necessarily strengthen motivation towards safety, and a potential safety benefit due to an increased frequency of one specific form of "safe" behaviour may simply be offset by road users less frequently displaying other forms of "safe" acting. "The risk is there that while the rewarded behavior may improve, other related safe behaviors may deteriorate."[29]
Attractiveness of the reward. Incentive programmes can be expected to be the more successful the more they widen the utility difference between the perceived benefit of not having an accident and the perceived disadvantage of having an accident. Rewards for accident-free operation in industry have taken many different forms, ranging from cash to public commendation. They include trading stamps, lottery tickets, gift certificates, shares of company stock, extra holidays[30] and other privileges. While the flexible uses of money prevents satiation from occurring, merchandise, especially customized merchandise, may have the advantage of constituting a lasting reminder of the value of safety. Merchandise items also have a value-added component in the sense that they can be obtained at a lower price than the recipients would likely have to pay if they bought the items at retail. Not surprisingly, in the United States a substantial industry has sprung up to provide companies with merchandise for safety prizes. Gift certificates hold a middle ground between cash and merchandise; they can be put to flexible use and yet be personalized and imprinted with a commemorative message. As noted above, drivers have also been rewarded with cash, free licence renewal, and automobile insurance rebates.[31]
Awards do not have to be very large to be effective. In fact, a case can be made for relatively small awards being preferable. Small awards make it possible to hand out awards more frequently, they are probably less conducive to under-reporting of accidents, and they may foster the internalization of pro-safety attitudes through the process of cognitive dissonance reduction.[32] When a small reward changes a person's behaviour, that person may justify that change by reasoning that the change was for safety's sake rather than due to the insignificant inducement. No such internalization of pro-safety attitudes is necessary when the external inducement is large, because in that case, it fully justifies the behaviour change.
It should be noted, however, that the attitude-shaping effect of modest awards can only take place after the operators have changed their behaviour for some minor external inducement. So, the award should be big enough to achieve some behaviour change to begin with. In some cases, a small material reward might imply a major social reward because of its symbolic function. Safe behaviour may thus become "the right thing to do". This might help explain why a modest incentive such as free licence renewal for one year produced a major reduction in the accident rate of California drivers.[33]
Moreover, earlier studies that found that wage increments for dangerous work were exponentially related to increases in the accident rate (to the third power), suggest that small increments in wages as a reward for not having an accident should reduce the accident rate by a comparatively large amount.[34] This is exactly what seems to have been the case in the German company mentioned above (see Section 11.2).
Progressive safety credits. The amount of the incentive should continue to grow progressively as the individual operator accumulates a larger number of uninterrupted accident-free periods. It is more difficult to achieve 10 consecutive accident-free years than to simply accumulate 10 years that were accident-free. Proper motivational stimulation demands that the bonus for 10 uninterrupted years of accident-free driving should be greater than 10 times the bonus for one year of accident-free driving.[35]
Simple rules. The operational rules of the programme should be kept simple so that they are easily understood by all persons to whom the programme applies.
Perceived equity. The incentive programme should be perceived as equitable by those to whom it is addressed. The bonus should be such that it is viewed as a just reward for not causing an accident in a given time period. Similarly, incentive systems should be designed in such a way that those workers who are not eligible for an award do not resent this, and those rewarded will be seen by others as justly receiving the award.[36] Since chance plays a part in whether any behaviour is followed by an accident, the actual receipt of the award may be made to depend upon the additional requirement that the accident-free worker in question also maintains cleanliness and safety in his or her workstation.[37] In the event that disincentives are used as well, it is necessary that the public view the imposed penalty as justified.
Perceived attainability. Programmes should be designed in such a way that the bonus is viewed as attainable. This is of particular importance if the bonus is awarded in a lottery system. Lotteries make it possible to hand out greater awards, and this may enhance the attention-getting appeal of an incentive programme. But fewer of the people who have accumulated the safety credit will receive the bonus, and this may discourage some people from making an active attempt to accumulate the safety credit to begin with.[38]
Short incubation period. The specified time period in which the individual has to remain accident-free in order to be eligible for the bonus should be relatively short. Delayed rewards and penalties tend to be discounted, and are thus less effective in shaping behaviour than more immediate consequences. Periods as short as one month have been used in industry. In the cited California experiment (see Section 11.2), those drivers whose licences were coming up for renewal within one year after being informed of the incentive programme showed a greater reduction in accident rate than did people whose licences were not to be renewed until two or three years later.
Rewarding group as well as individual performance. Incentive programmes should be designed in such a way that they strengthen peer pressure towards the objective of having no accident. Thus, the plan should not only stimulate individual operators' concern for their own safety, but also motivate them to influence peers, so that their accident likelihood is also reduced. In industrial settings this is achieved by offering a bonus for accident-free performance to the work team as well as to the individual. The team bonus has been found to increase competitive motivation towards winning the team award. A dual bonus plan--individual and team--for drivers in the same age bracket and living in the same city has been suggested and is known as the "Saskatchewan plan".[39] Social pressure towards safe conduct can also be enhanced by informing families about the safety award programme, its safety goals, and potential rewards.[40] Team awards add a material incentive to act as "one's brother's keeper", and they have also been found effective in isolation, that is, in the absence of awards for individual performance.[41]
Operator participation in programme design. Any incentive scheme should be developed in cooperation and consultation with those people to whom it will be applied. People are more likely to achieve goals they themselves have helped define.[42,43] An "incentive" can be an incentive only to the extent it is considered to be an incentive by the audience to whom it is addressed. A programme that fails to have the endorsement of the target audience may be resented and lead to unwanted consequences similar to those observed when unsafe acts are being punished (see Section 11.1).
Prevention of accident under-reporting. Thought should be given to the question of how to counteract operators' tendency not to report their accidents. The stimulation of such tendencies seems to be the only, currently identified, negative side effect of incentive programmes, although, occasionally, moral objections have been raised against rewarding people for obtaining a goal they should aspire to on their own, without being "bribed into safety". Some incentive programmes have clauses providing for deduction of safety credits if accidents are not reported.[44] Fortunately, only minor accidents tend to go unreported, but the greater the safety bonus, the more frequent this phenomenon (as well as hit-and-run accidents) may become.
Reward all levels of the organization. Supervisors and middle management, as well as shop-floor workers, should be rewarded for safe performance . This creates a more cohesive and pervasive safety orientation within a company.[45,46,47,48]
Whether or not to supplement rewards with safety training. Although educating towards safety is different from motivating towards safety, and a person's ability to be safe should be clearly distinguished from that person's willingness to be safe, some authors in the field of incentives in industrial settings feel that it may be helpful to safety if workers are told what specific behaviours will help avoid accidents.[49,50,51]
Maximizing net savings versus maximizing benefit/cost. In the planning of an incentive programme, thought should be given to the question of what actually constitutes its primary goal: the greatest possible cost-effective accident reduction or a maximal benefit/cost ratio. Some programmes may reduce the accident frequency only slightly, but achieve this at a very low cost. The benefit/cost ratio may thus be higher than is true for another programme where the ratio between benefits and costs is lower, but the capability to reduce accident rates is much greater. As distinct from the issue of the size of the benefit/cost ratio, the total amount of money saved may well be much greater in the latter case.
Consider the following example. Safety programme A can save $700,000 at an implementation cost of $200,000. Programme B can save $900,000 at a cost of $300,000. In terms of benefit/cost, A's ratio is 3.5, while B's ratio equals 3.0. Thus, against the benefit/cost criterion, A is superior, but if net savings are considered, the picture is different. While programme A saves $700,000 minus $200,000, or $500,000, programme B saves $900,000 minus $300,000, or $600,000. In terms of net savings, programme B is to be preferred.
Research component. Like any other accident countermeasure, an incentive plan should not be introduced without prior research into its short-term and long-term feasibility and its best possible form. Nor should it be introduced without provision for scientifically adequate evaluation of its implementation costs and its observed effectiveness in reducing the accident rate. The knowledge base of the safety research and application community is unlikely to grow without proper evaluation and ready access to publications. Without such research, the surprising effect of one particular reward programme would never have come to light. There seems little chance for safety incentives to have a negative effect, but one variation of a series of California reward/incentive programmes for the general driving public produced worse driving records. In this programme, a benefit was given to drivers with no accidents on their records, without their prior knowledge of that benefit. It took the form of an unexpected reward rather than an incentive, and this highlights the importance of the distinction between incentive and reward for effective motivational safety programming. The term "incentive" refers to a pre-announced gratification or bonus extended to workers or drivers on the specific condition that they do not have an accident that is their own fault within a specified time period.
In industry it is relatively easy to keep the incubation period of the award quite short, for instance, as short as a month, like the pay cheque; for drivers in the general population, this would be unmanageable for administrative reasons.
More importantly, perhaps, it is obviously advantageous to companies to institute incentive systems, because the savings (including discounts in insurance fees) are usually very much greater than the implementation costs. The most attractive incentives to drivers in the general population are likely to be those that could, in principle, be offered by automobile insurance companies, and that might take the form of tangible discounts or rebates for claim-free driving.
On the other hand, the very fact that one can purchase insurance against certain hazards diminishes the threat of the consequences of these hazards. Insurance, therefore, may be expected to increase people's willingness to expose themselves to these hazards, with an increase in the number of casualties as a consequence. Similarly, it is not surprising that increases in workers' compensation payments for injuries may increase the rate of workplace accidents.[54]
Following the California example mentioned above, a government might offer a one-year free driver's licence extension for each year drivers are accident-free. In addition, and as a disincentive, the validity of a driver's licence might be shortened by one year as a penalty for each year in which the driver had one or more culpable accidents. Another way of using driver's licence renewal as a source of incentives/ disincentives could consist of discounts and surcharges in the renewal fee.
Following the Connecticut example, a government might abolish any existing subsidies for the provision of driver training. Such subsidies effectively stimulate driving. When they are discontinued, fewer young people obtain a driver's licence and expose themselves to the risk of an accident while driving a car. This, naturally, would be a one-time intervention, rather than an ongoing one.
Another opportunity for incentives is offered by reducing the charge for the annual validation sticker of vehicle permits (the annual road tax). This incentive could be based on the "culpable accident experience of the vehicle", that is, regardless of the identity of the driver(s) of the vehicle, but depending upon whether the driver was at fault. The incentive would be extended to the owner. Surcharges in annual permit fees might be used as an analogous disincentive.
Discounts and surcharges on income taxes paid by holders of driver's licences might be considered, and this would be justified if a government's expenditures for medical treatment of people injured in accidents exceeds revenue from contributions to medical insurance. Similarly, discounts and/or surcharges related to drivers' culpable accident experience might be applied to their medical insurance fees.
Finally, a government might attempt to exert pressure on private automobile insurance companies to install incentive and disincentive schemes of their own. Other companies, like the ones that sell gasoline and tires, might be requested to provide free merchandise or discounts to drivers who are accident-free over a specified period of time. The companies in question might well find this an appealing proposition in their attempt to attract loyal and creditable customers.
Obviously, some of these bonus and penalty systems would be more cumbersome to implement and administer than others. Part of the administrative difficulty arises from the need for verification of driver and vehicle record accuracy and recency.[55]
We will refrain from elaborating here on the procedural details of the above suggestions, for two reasons. First, each of the suggestions offered is in need of an in-depth feasibility study by officials in administrative domains, and in countries in which the present author cannot claim to have expertise. Secondly, although there is reason to believe that the potential accident-reducing effect of the above suggestions is sizable enough to warrant serious consideration, this effect is likely to be relatively modest in comparison with what may be achieved in terms of accident prevention through discounts and surcharges in automobile insurance.
But what are insurance companies likely to do? This is a highly interesting question for a number of reasons, and the striking diversity in points of view is just one of them. Consider, for instance, the following quotations:
In a similar vein, an insurance commentator writing in Lloyd's List while commenting on inventors and their safety gadgetry:
According to the first view, the insurance industry has a positive interest in accident reduction. The second holds the view that the insurance industry is not interested in this objective and that it is nice but naive to suggest that preventive action be undertaken by the insurance industry. A third view--expressed by the present author--states that the interests of the insurance industry would actually be served if the accident rate remained at a high level.
The insurance industry is in a peculiar situation. It offers a much-wanted, even compulsory, service in providing protection against the more serious financial consequences of accidents that happen to their customers. On the other hand, the very fact that insurance can be bought against certain hazards diminishes the threat of the consequences of these hazards and, therefore, may be expected to increase people's willingness to expose themselves to these hazards, with an increase in the number of casualties as a consequence. This has also been noticed by several analysts,[60,61] just as others have reported that increases in workers' compensation payments for injuries may increase the rate of workplace accidents.[62] Phrased in simple terms: to offer people protection against the consequences of risky behaviour encourages risky behaviour; to offer people better protection against the consequences of risky behaviour encourages riskier behaviour still. A Dutch automobile insurance company advertised its services, quite honestly, by showing a picture of a collision of two cars in front of their office, with the slogan: "Our own driving isn't always all that fantastic either. That's why our insurance coverage is so complete."[63]
Automobile insurance sells peace of mind, which is nice, but it is also a problem for that very reason. Not surprisingly, automobile insurance was, at one time, forbidden by law in some parts of the world. It was seen as encouraging imprudence. In short, "l'assurance pousse au crime"--insurance stimulates crime.[64]
Another example of the nefarious effect of "better protection" upon safety is the institution of no-fault insurance for drivers. No-fault insurance means that drivers who collide with one another are entitled to compensation for the damages incurred, regardless of who was responsible for the collision. Thus, the cost for being responsible for an accident is reduced. A law to this effect came into force in Québec in 1978, along with some other minor regulations. An economist working in that part of the world, and interested in establishing the effect of the law, calculated that accidents with property damage only increased by 11%, accidents with personal injury by 26%, and fatalities by 7%. The economist noted that, while the "centralized compensation system [. . .] generally increased the speed, frequency, and size of compensations, it also probably led to a condition that would lower the incentive to drive safely", and that "lowered the average quality and motivation to safety of the stock of drivers because of the sudden subsidy given to relatively risky drivers and the suppression of the notion of fault for all drivers".[65]
So, the very existence of automobile insurance, as well as its specific operational rules, may have the effect of increasing the size of the problem it sells protection against. The opportunity for profit to the insurance industry also increases in this process.
Therefore, for the sake of safety, it is desirable that insurance practices are structured in a manner such that risk-taking tendencies of customers are being counteracted. One attempt in this direction is to offer premium discounts to young drivers who have had a particular type of driver training. Another is premium discounts for periods of accident-free driving.
In North America it is not uncommon for insurance companies to offer discounts for newly licensed drivers, provided they have taken a driver education course offered by high schools. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a course has a beneficial effect upon the accident rate of graduates (see Section 6.2). The fact that, they are, nonetheless, offered an insurance discount, could either be explained by the insurers suffering a mistaken belief in the accident-reducing effectiveness of such courses, or their expectation that the discount will effectively subsidize driving by young people and thus enlarge the market of potential insurees and thus the potential for profit. The marked sensitivity of young people to subsidies that help them obtain a driver's licence and, thus, the ability to drive, has been clearly established (see Section 11.3). Where such subsidies were eliminated, there was a sharp decline in road accidents among the relevant age groups.
In the province of Ontario, Canada, it is common practice for insurance companies to give fee discounts that are greater as the number of claim-free years increases. But this is only true for up to five years of accident-free driving, as if such discounts would have no accident-reducing effect beyond that period.[66] In passing, we note that Icelandic drivers receive free automobile insurance during the 10th year, if they are claim-free during the preceding nine years. And what may be worse from the point of view of accident prevention in Ontario, is that a driver with five or more fault-free years, who has an accident in which he or she is at fault, is not likely to incur an increase in insurance fees. The reason the insurance companies have this "forgiveness clause" would seem to be that the driver in question is seen as a relatively good risk whose business would be badly missed if it went to the competition. This practice, however, fails to bring the accident rate down to a level as low as it perhaps could have been otherwise. The same may be true for insurance that is offered in some countries, Great Britain, for instance, against losing one's driver's licence as the consequence of some behaviour such as driving while under the influence of alcohol.
One thing that's clear from these considerations is that the optimal accident rate is different for different people. Years ago this was emphasized by an author who, for reasons of social equity, proposed the notion of an "accident tax" to be levied on companies in order to compensate for the fact that only part of accidents costs are carried by the company in question, and the other part by society in general.[67] This accident tax would be expected to stimulate companies to make an additional effort at accident reduction. Because different social factions are interested in different levels of safety, and interested in different means for attaining it, safety is a bone of contention, a political issue. Safety is not as sweet and innocent as motherhood and apple pie. Rather, it is an apple of discord and it would be wise to be cognizant of this fact.
While, as individual persons or as corporate citizens, people in the private insurance industry may have a genuine interest in promoting safety, one cannot expect a business to act against its direct commercial interests. However, it is no less relevant to note that the absence of a strong concern for reducing the accident rate may also be reflected by many of the countermeasures taken by those governments that have no direct financial or political stake in actual accident reduction. This is because politicians may be tempted, for public relations reasons, to take measures whose main or exclusive merit consists of showing the electorate that something is being done about the safety problem. Surely, political expedience demands that safety is seen to be promoted; whether it actually is promoted is another matter.[68,69]
Unfortunately, when the recent history of road safety management in various countries or smaller jurisdictions is compared with other government concerns such as health care, it will be obvious that many governments have failed to develop coherent and vigorous strategies for traffic accident prevention. In part, this may be due to the fact that responsibility for safety is usually divided across various ministries, such as health, education, justice, transportation and internal affairs. This very division of responsibility may reflect lack of governmental concern for the issue.
In this context it should be noted that general public pressure for greater safety is also lacking. Apart from occasional outcries by some citizen groups in some jurisdictions against the omnipresent infestation of automobiles, against the safety threat posed by heavy trucks or by the young or drunk drivers, there seems to be no strong and persistent demand for greater safety throughout the general population.
If, in fact, such a demand existed, people would not wait for government action, but simply resort to their own capabilities to reduce the accident rate by voluntarily changing their amount and manner of road use. In other words, people in any jurisdiction have the accident rate they are collectively willing to accept, in return for the amount and manner of mobility they enjoy. Unless the desire for safety is somehow stimulated, people will exert only a little pressure on their government to reduce the accident rate, and in turn, the government is not likely to develop the political will that is necessary to take more than symbolic measures towards accident reduction. It would seem fair to conclude that there is little ongoing governmental, corporate or public interest in reducing the traffic accident rate. Whether this is irrational or not is another matter. So far in this book, we have made the tacit assumption that the accident rate should be reduced, but against the criterion of net social benefit maximization, this may not be so. Even if it were true that reduced speed limits save lives on the road, the increased travel time may produce greater costs to society than the benefits in casualties saved.[70]
We will return to this issue in the next chapter, but it's worth noting that enforcement of speed limits may merely have the effect of "accident migration". A German study reports a 21% reduction on an expressway following the introduction of a speed limit where no limit had existed. A stretch of expressway running parallel to the one with the new speed limit experienced a 29% increase in accidents, apparently as the result of the fact that drivers who did not want to forgo speedy progress simply took an alternative route.[71]
In order to break this vicious circle (vicious from the safety promotion point of view) between people's complacency and a lack of political will on the part of their elected representatives to reduce the accident rate, what can a government do?
Suppose we are dealing with a government that is fully aware of the tremendous costs of traffic accidents to its jurisdiction. Suppose, too, that we are dealing with a government that wishes to play a leadership role in reducing the traffic accident rate per head of population, rather than to remain a mere follower of existing public attitude and conduct. In that case, the answer to what a government could do in order to reduce the traffic accident rate is very simple: (a) assume public responsibility for automobile insurance, and (b) impose insurance fees that take account of each individual driver's past accident record and of the requirements for effective incentive programming described above. In doing so, a government would be able to achieve two things: it would pull itself up by its own bootstraps in becoming more concerned about safety promotion than before, and it would enhance the general public's desire for safety and strengthen public support for government action toward that goal.
In addition, there is reason to expect that a government's commitment to road safety promotion will increase with time if it assumes responsibility for accident insurance. When claim costs rise from year to year as a consequence of continued inflation, there would seem to be three options for a government to cope with this:
Since the first two alternatives are unlikely to be attractive to a government that wishes to stay in power, it will be more inclined to develop a stronger thrust in the pursuit of accident reduction.
Of the two major social establishments that can offer incentives--governments and automobile insurance--automobile insurance institutions would seem to be able to offer the most effective ones. Automobile insurance companies, however, when run by private enterprise, cannot be expected to implement incentive programmes with vigour and persistence, because a very low accident rate in the jurisdiction in which they operate is not in their business interest.
Governments, on the other hand, often are more interested in being seen by the citizenry to be doing something about the road safety problem, rather than actually doing something about it, while citizens seem to accept the road accident toll in return for the benefit of the amount and style of road use they enjoy. Citizens, however, can be made more interested in displaying self-protective behaviour if they are better rewarded for safety. Then they will put greater pressure on governments to pursue the goal of safety more vigorously.
Ergo, the merits of public, as opposed to private, ownership of automobile insurance deserve to be seriously debated.
Besides having the possible negative side-effect of accident under-reporting, incentives also have positive side effects. For one thing, they are a money-making proposition in industry: savings in terms of accident reduction usually exceed by far the costs of implementing a programme of this kind. For another, they lead to better company morale.[72] As is true for successful productivity gainsharing programmes,[73] safety incentive programmes can help improve the general organizational climate and, therefore, make a positive contribution to productivity over and above the gain due to accident reduction. Safety incentives give workers a common cause with each other as well as with management. Reinforcing safe acts "removes the unwanted side effects with discipline and the use of penalties; it increases employees' job satisfaction; it enhances the relationship between supervisors and employees...."[74] Is it unreasonable to expect that incentives for safety and health, applied to the general population, would not only promote safety and health, but also have the favourable side effect of improving the general social climate including people's respect for the authorities and the law of the land?
A leading literature review contains the following statement: "The major finding was that every study, without exception, concluded that incentives or feedback enhanced safety, and/or reduced accidents in the work place, at least in the short term. Few literature reviews find such consistent results."[75] So, if incentive programmes are found to be the most powerful tools for safety on the job and on the road, why are they not implemented much more frequently than is presently the case? One factor may be plain ignorance of their very existence, or lack of knowledge as to how they are best implemented. Another factor may be the fear that accident under-reporting will be the result. While there is some justification for this, it is also valid to say that, in industry, it may be possible to conceal a minor injury, but one cannot hide a corpse. There may be resistance because of the attitudes of unions, of management or, more generally, because of company climate.
Particular incentives that appeal to operators in one cultural context may be viewed as mere "hoopla" in another. In addition to ignorance and opposition, there may be indifference to the notion of accident reduction because it would have little consequence for the company concerned. This may be the case if the company has proper insurance against accident consequences and if the insurance premium to be paid does not depend upon the safety record of the company in question. An official in one such company told me that there was more interest in having a good estimate of how many accidents were likely to happen in the future, rather than in having fewer accidents, because having that estimate would help in planning for equipment and personnel that would have to be replaced.
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