An interactive game which records reaction times suggests that people who regularly consume higher levels of alcohol are up to 20% slower to react than those who consume lower levels.
Released in the build-up to Road Safety Week (23-29 Nov) the ‘Emergency Stop’ reaction time test measures in milliseconds (ms). The test shows that those who consume on average 1-10 units of alcohol per week had a reaction time of 508ms, compared to 605ms for those who consume 31-40 units per week.
JustPark*, the game’s creator, tested it on 2,000 people of all ages, and found that reaction time is affected by a number of other factors including the amount of sleep and driving experience the participant had.
For example, people who slept eight hours the night before taking the survey reported the fastest average reaction times (525ms), up to 20% faster than those who has less sleep. Those who slept six hours recorded on average 544ms, five hours 575ms and four hours 653ms. It also showed that those who slept for longer than eight hours had slower reaction times: at nine hours the average response time was 545ms, and for 10 or more hours 649ms.
The reaction time of drivers who drive more than once a week (496ms) is on average 10% faster than that of non-drivers (548ms). More broadly, people who hold a driver’s licence reacted 8% faster than those without one.
The report also suggests reaction time gets better with driving experience. Drivers with 1-2 years of driving experience (391ms) reported a 27% faster reaction time than those who had held a licence for less than a year (536ms).
Men demonstrated reaction times that were on average 0.02ms or 5% faster than women.
JustPark*
JustPark is an online service that matches drivers with spare car parking spaces. It is the UK’s largest homegrown sharing economy company, with more than 750,000 registered users.
This is a really insightful piece. The JustPark study clearly highlights factors often overlooked, especially the nuanced impact of sleep – not just too little, but also too much! The correlation between alcohol units and reaction speed is stark, reinforcing the road safety message effectively. It’s also fascinating how driving experience tangibly improves reaction times according to your findings.
Reading this actually prompted me to see where my own reaction time stands under different conditions. I ended up finding a pretty comprehensive online tool for this while searching around, reactiontimetest.net. What I appreciated was that it’s completely free to use, available globally and supports multiple languages, which is great for wider accessibility or comparison if needed. It runs very smoothly and offers a few different ways to test reaction speed, which adds another layer to exploring the factors you discussed, like fatigue.
Just thought I’d share it as a resource in case others reading this were also curious to try a quick test themselves after seeing these compelling results from JustPark. Keep up the great work highlighting these important safety factors!
daniel-morris
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Although the exercise is primarily designed to illustrate what affects our reaction times, it would also be useful and perhaps more meaningful to then show to the participants, the actual differences in stopping distances (from the same speed), that these different reaction times would have represented. What woud be the actual difference in stopping distances between a reaction time of 391ms and 653ms for instance?
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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