Safe Driving 1: Traffic Regulation Violation
       - The Most Frequent Violation is ’Cellphone Use’

  There are many regulations to follow for safe driving. The most frequent violation that drivers commit appeared as the use of mobile phones while driving, followed by ‘Not keeping safe distance’, ‘Speeding’ and ‘Stop line violation’, in order. At the center of regulatory violations, there was ‘Speeding’. Drivers who tended to speed used mobile phones more and violated more other regulations. Reducing speeding can decrease the total regulatory violations.

  Marketing Insight, an automobile specialized research firm (www.consumerinsight.co.kr), asked 1,158 drivers to mark all the regulations that had been violated even once during past one week after presenting the 19 behavior of violation in 2014 Automobile Syndicated Research [Table 1]. As a result, ‘Mobile phone use violation’ was the highest at 45%, followed by ‘Not keeping safe distance’ at 38%, ‘Speeding’ at 34% and ‘Stop line violation’ at 33%, in order, displaying violation rate of 1 or more out of 3 drivers.

  The number of violated regulation types was 3.7 kinds on average, among which male had 4.0 kinds on average and female had 2.4 kinds on average, displaying much more kinds of men. Men displayed higher violation rate in Speed violation (16%p) and Not keeping safe distance (15%p) than women, while women had no higher violation rate in 19 kinds. [Attachment]. When calculating 11 Major faults only, the overall average is 1.3 kinds with male at 1.4 kinds and female at 0.8 kind, displaying more men committing more serious violations.

  Most commonly committed ‘Mobile phone use behavior while driving’ was subdivided into 9 behaviors and received answer as one of ‘I Never Do It’, ‘I Hardly Do It’ and ‘I Often Do It’. For ‘I Never Do It’, ‘Getting a phone call’ was the lowest at 6%, followed by ‘Making a phone call’ at 14% [Table 2]. This reveals that almost all the drivers receive phone call while driving, and 8 to 9 out of 10 drivers are even making calls. ‘I Never Do It’ of ‘Navigation control’ and ‘Text message/Messenger read/write’ also stays in one out of five people (19% & 20%, respectively), displaying that they are doing something else, which essentially require mental concentration, while driving that requires mental focusing.

  In particular, the drivers with speeding tendency in their driving habits displayed more use of mobile phones. They do more ‘Taking/viewing pictures’ (28%p), ‘Internet search’ (26%p), ‘Checking email’ (24%p) than the drivers who are not found to be so. It is possible to know that speeding drivers are those dangerous drivers doing something else while driving.

  Even though the most part of safety is the responsibility of driver, not least number of drivers appeared to be safety frigidity. And the key seems to be speeding. The speeding drivers tend to violate other regulations and tend to do something else such as using mobile phones. When they do not speed, they are possible to keep many other regulations, too. Lowering the speeding can also lower doing something else while driving and will increase safe driving.

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