Psychology

High speed, lax laws

Speeding kills 200 people and injures another 6,000 in Quebec every year. In fact, after drunk driving, speeding is the second major cause of death on Quebec’s roads. Based on Ministère des Transports statistics, 77% of passenger vehicle drivers exceed the speed limit in the city, 64% on major roads and 75% on highways.

“In Quebec, high-speed drivers are not punished severely enough,” says Marie Claude Ouimet, who is finishing up her doctoral thesis on dangerous driving, at the Université de Montréal’s Department of Psychology. Compared to the Netherlands, where speeding is considered a potentially criminal act, Quebec’s penalties are particularly light. Ms Ouimet considers speeds exceeding the legal limit by 45 to 50 km/h as “high-speed driving.”

As part of her research, Ms Ouimet contacted young drivers who had been stopped by the police for speeding and asked them to answer a questionnaire to determine to what degree they were willing to change their behaviour behind the wheel. “For my thesis, I matched personalized feedback with speeding behaviour. It’s the approach usually employed when you want to change public-health behaviour.”

The objective was to see if drivers who regularly exceed the speed limit change their behaviour after a personalized intervention. With the help of the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ), 60 drivers were contacted. The data analysis currently underway seems to suggest that the propensity to speed is difficult to change. “Despite the SAAQ’s campaign, speed is highly valued by our society. In fact, performance is often a key selling point.” Indeed, one has to simply look at the number of television ads that feature cars racing along winding roads.

For the last 30 years, intensive prevention campaigns launched by public safety officials to reduce the number of drinking-related road deaths have been clearly successful. “On the other hand, the strategies to prevent speeding have been poorly developed and focus mainly on ticketing. We need to use a variety of methods,” explains Ms Ouimet. According to this expert, a tougher approach is needed to deal with drivers convicted of speeding, particularly when it comes to repeat offenders.