Duncan McKillop (left), a regular contributor to discussion threads on this newsfeed, is involved in a new initiative which is setting out to “shift the paradigm of thinking about road safety” from what it calls the “Old View” to a “New View”.
The team behind the ‘No Surprise: No Accident’ initiative comprises: Alf Gasparro, an air ambulance pilot who has “responded to hundreds of motorcycle accidents”; Kevin Williams, who offers post-test and advanced training via his school, ‘Survival Skills’; and Duncan McKillop who holds a ROSPA diploma in advanced motorcycle instruction and ran Total Control Advanced Riding Clinics in UK.
The website says the “current (road safety) system” is “based on an outdated ‘Old View’ paradigm” which “often makes unrealistic assumptions about the ability of people to conform to a rule-bound and normative ‘ideal driving’ model”.
It describes the road safety industry as “heavy on blame culture, meaning that instead of equipping drivers and riders to avoid crashes, it either deters or punishes those seen as failing to conform to the ‘ideal driving’ model, putting emphasis on fines and convictions”.
It says ‘No Surprise: No Accident’ is setting out to “change current road safety thinking by adopting a ‘New View’ of safety based on lessons learned in other industries, and in particular by recognising the limitations of human beings in operating within any driving model”.
It claims to offer “a theory that fits with scientific principles and incorporates fundamental knowledge from the fields of human factors, neuroscience, psychology and perception as well from established practice in the aviation industry”.
The website says: “We intend to create a community of like-minded people who will become the advocates and supporters of the new way of thinking.
“This critical mass of voices will put a constant and increasing pressure on decision makers to rethink and change the current approach to road safety, and will win the support of other various road safety campaigns and educate them about the benefits of the ‘New View’ of road safety.”
In terms of influencing motorcyclists the partners “intend to roll out a series of campaigns targeting the biking population convincing them to the benefits of the new thinking”.
I think essentialy it boils down to the same thing Duncan. I’d prefer to use the word ‘anticipate’ rather than ‘predict’ but either way, it doesn’t matter, as long as it works and motorists can be persuaded to adopt it – an uphill struggle unfortunately.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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Not ‘defensive’ driving Hugh, ‘predictive’ driving is the key.
Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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I agree with your last comment Duncan, particularly the last paragraph – you’ve summarised the art of defensive driving very well, although in Tim’s defence, there are situations where there really is no escape e.g. on a single width country lane when a vehicle comes around the corner too fast towards you. One could sound the horn in advance as a warning of course and if that fails, even stop dead easily enough and if you’re very, very smart, reverse even, but not if there’s a vehicle behind. Personally, I crawl around such bends, (not literally obviously, I’m still in the car) craning my neck to get the earliest warning, foot over the brake in readiness. Such ‘no escape’ scenarios are rare fortunately and if your little enterprise can get the defensive driving message ‘out there’, you’re on the right track.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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If there is no escape route Tim it puts an added reliance on a driver’s heightened awareness of the situation unfolding around them. Bob recommends the availability of lots of space into which you can move in order to be able to avoid someone else’s accident and this is very sage advice indeed.
The key point here is that the good driver is so adept at predicting what’s going to happen next that they never get involved in somebody else’s accident! Take an overtake in lane three of the motorway when the inside two lanes are occupied by nearly nose to tail trucks. It often happens that a truck will swerve into the outside lane as part of their exit strategy to avoid something horrid happening in front of them. As the overtaking driver you will notice the complete lack of any escape route and will thus be prepared for something to happen.
The whole art of safe driving is sifting subtle clues from the unfolding situation, making predictions from those clues as to what can happen next and then controlling the vehicle to take advantage or reduce disadvantage from those predictions. Our contention is that a failure to make accurate predictions is the sole reason anybody gets involved in an accident, either theirs or anybody else’s.
Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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Duncan:
I think your last comment is stretching reason somewhat. I can accept in principle that an escape route for Bob/Idris would have been a good idea, but in some situations there is not scope for an escape route, or there is an escape route which puts you in greater danger than before (eg in the path of of oncoming traffic). Also, assuming Bob/Idris took their escape route the vehicle in front of them would be next in line for impact, and they would not have had the luxury of being able to see it coming.
Thinking about preventing such incidents in the future I suspect there is more mileage in addressing the system that leads the moving driver to fail than getting everyone in every queue to adopt an escape route given the tiny likelihood of recurrence and successful implementation. I am surprised you have not suggested car manufacturers do more to make brakes non-slip if you believe that the stated reason was the actual one for the collision. Of course it is possible that in the aftermath of collisions people don’t describe what actually happened. Personally, I can’t recall one occasion in over 30 years when my foot has slipped off the brake pedal.
Tim Philpot, Wolverhampton
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The accidents that Idris and Bob have detailed are classic examples of prediction failures and the idea behind ‘it takes two to tangle’. In both cases there were precipitating errors made by one party, but in order for the collision to occur there had to be a completing error on behalf of the other party. It is these completing errors that reveal a great deal about the accident causation process, but they are usually completely ignored. The completing error in both cases was that both Idris and Bob had not allowed themselves an exit strategy (exit or wrecks it) and once they stopped they had not diverted their attention to their rear where traffic was still capable of moving. Had they both got an exit strategy and noticed the out of control vehicles bearing down on them then they could easily have got out of the way.
In both these cases the collision speeds were low, but instead of a lady in sensible shoes what if it were a 42 tonne artic that was out of control? Such a collision would have absolutely flattened the smaller vehicles and Bob and Idris probably wouldn’t be here today to talk about it.
Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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I’d like to add my good wishes to this enterprise: I’m all for reasoned solutions. If I may, I’d also like to sound a few notes of caution, prompted as much as anything else by reaction to the recent Level Crossings item on the newsfeed.
1. The blame culture appears to be perfectly acceptable when it is pointed at the Authorities. The BTP website http://www.btp.police.uk/latest_news/look_don’t_risk_it.aspx states that 900 level crossings have been closed. If you want to be credible, be objective.
2. The fact that something is possible does not mean it is viable or without negative outcome. There are many considerations around how to manage legacy issues like road/rail crossings and not a limitless supply of resources. Also, the highway is public domain and there is no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to bypassing safety arrangements.
3. Don’t look for complex answers until you have ruled out the simple ones. Does the cyclist in the level crossing video have eyes which only notice certain things, or a brain which interprets selectively? Or is he just not pointing his eyes where reason says he should?
4. The fact that science can explain why something happens does not mean the information gained can provide a preventative solution. Collisions are idiosyncratic, like lots of different and complicated padlocks. You might, by detailed analysis, cut a key that fits one lock, but if it can’t open any others then the effort is wasted. What is needed (if you’ll forgive the continued analogy) is skeleton keys, or interventions which work at mitigating the contributory factors involved.
Tim Philpot, Wolverhampton
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Thanks Idris. It’s difficult enough having to watch out for the oxymorons on the roads without having to watch out for them in sentences as well, but thanks anyway.
Re- your accident/collision/incident – had it been serious enough to involve the police, I don’t think they would have fallen for the old “..my foot slipped off the pedal..” routine, I think they’ve probably heard that one before!
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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Idris I think that you mean ‘failed to stop in time’
However the question is…. how far behind you was she when she saw you stopped. Perhaps may I suggest that she was too close to be able to stop anyway. It’s something that you would or might not be aware of and could only say so if you had seen her behind you prior to the incident. I think that you were extremely reserved as the damage was in the region of £4000, it must have looked horrific and that you were charitable by not calling the police as I believe that many including myself would have. Got to comment but I believe that only a woman would have agreed that the other party as wearing suitable shoes.
I was shunted a couple of years ago, I was stopped at traffic lights when a woman in a BMW hit my rear end, just a shunt. It was downhill to the lights and it had been snowing so it was obvious to me she had slid down the hill probably having braked too late. There was no damage as such and we went our separate ways but I could have argued that she should have known better. I think she will take greater care in the future.
Bob Craven Lancs Space is Safe Campaigner
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A few years ago Hugh I had just comfortably stopped behind a long queue of cars when there was a loud bang as I was hit from behind by a car that failed to stop. It turned out that the lady’s foot has slipped off the brake pedal at precisely the wrong moment. My guess is that her car, bonnet dented and steam coming from the radiator etc, might well have been a write-off, mine suffered £4k damage paid by her insurers without any quibble as she had admitted liability to them (I asked her not to do so to me because that could haave invalidated her insurance). And yes Hugh, I did speak politely and calmly to her, agreed that as no one was hurt there was no need to call the police, helped her move her car off the road until the recovery vehicle arrived and after checking, drove my car home. No problem, no blame, just one of those things, an accident. And as far as I could tell, perfectly sensible shoes for driving.
Idris Francis Fight Back With Facts Petersfield
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Hugh – “perpetrators of accidents” is an oxymoron.
Idris Francis Fight Back With Facts Petersfield
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There is a flaw in believing that one can ascertain or try to ascertain a possible causation or contributory factor prior to the accident. Unless it an obvious one. I appreciate that some may very well be of relevance but rarely sought for the purposes of Stats19.
No one in an incident being injured or otherwise, perhaps a witness, may draw the matter to the investigators attention and/or the right questions may not be asked or such evidence may not be possibly identified or sought at some time following the incident.
It would appear that there are many new matters that need to be understood and investigated under this new initiative and no doubt it will take some time to produce and obtain results. That is not at all aimed at being a criticism. I do believe that if it is found, for example, that a particular problem exists at a particular location it should be identified as being contributory and corrected.
Bob craven Lancs…. Space is Safe campaigner
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Duncan:
Instead of trying to find from individual accident perpertrators what they did wrong and what led up to it (practically impossible anyway) and not that difficult to work out independently, would it not be less trouble to simply establish what many motorists do to keep themselves accident and incident-free day-in and day-out? You and your colleagues are no doubt in this category and it won’t be down to just pure luck and chance, so why not identify a few principles and come up with a recipe for safe motoring? That’s the easy bit, your problem will be getting the messages across to those who need to hear it, which is what various road safety organisations have been struggling with for years.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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It has long been my view that crash investigation should primarily be concerned with establishing all causation factors and finding out what any of the parties involved could have done to prevent the crash. This analysis should then be used to create a targeted and proportional approach to training, educational campaigns, enforcement and engineering. Yes, of course blame apportionment is important for prosecution purposes but establishing what needs to be done to prevent a recurrence is far more important. Perhaps we need to adopt the ABD suggestion of an independent body for road accident investigation as with rail and air?
Chris Wilson
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The more we learn about prediction failure Hugh the easier it will be to determine if there are any patterns to these failures. Asking the drivers involved is certainly one way of finding some of the answers, but we suspect that there will be other methods that can also be employed. What we really want to find out is whether there were any clues in the scene before the incident that if they had been noticed would have led to a better outcome. It’s clear from the statistics that young drivers are suffering from many more prediction failures than the more experienced drivers so the ability to point out salient clues earlier in the learning process could well prove to be beneficial.
Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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I agree with Bob, environment should be a major consideration. You’ve got to be able to describe and understand the environment before you can: engineer it; educate people about it and enforce laws relating to factors connected with it.
Ultimately road safety professionals and those with an active interest in the subject are all sharing the same aim of helping road users integrate effectively and safely with the road and traffic environment so that incidents/collisions are reduced.
Mark – Wiltshire
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Just want to throw this in. I am in accord with what Duncan and friends are doing even though I am supporting my own little initiative of Space is safe Campaign. In the last report from Duncan he mentioned the possibility of environmental clues when looking at accident, whoops sorry, incidents or collisions.
To my mind there has always been a fourth ‘E’ in regards to road safety, that’s Engineering, Education, Enforcement and Environment. The last one now completes the square and gives another facet to be given our considerations. Include it, understand it and then we will have more to work with.
Bob Craven Lancs….. Space is Safe Campaigner
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Congratulations on the ‘new initiative’, I hope it proceeds to make a difference in understanding the triggers and causes of accidents/collisions/incidents. For those who are unsure of what the definition of an accident is, most dictionaries will supply the answer.
Derek Reynolds, Salop.
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Your concept of trying to understand these failures is laudable Duncan and a subject in itself, but in practice how are you going to ascertain from individual motorists their ‘failures to predict’ when something did go wrong?
Supposing a speeding driver mounted the footway and you had to jump out of the way to save your own life? Assuming they stopped, would you sit down around the table and amicably discuss their “failure to predict” or would you bawl them out and say “You nearly killed me you xxxx – you shouldn’t have been going so fast!” Would you report them to the Police or a psychologist?
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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I wish Duncan, Alf and Kevin the best of success with their new initiative. We all need to look at new ways of thinking and weigh up the pros and cons for ourselves.
These three individuals have my respect and admiration for daring to do something different and looking at incident/collision/accident causation and development in a new and innovative way with respect to road safety.
I’m not going to get involved in the debate about what words should or not be used when it all unravels and goes ‘bang’! What is important is that we all share our ideas and knowledge and actively encourage and stimulate others to venture into new thoughts that will result in newer and better ways of doing things. That’s what a great site like this is for.
Mark – Wiltshire
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What we are trying to get across with our little project Hugh is that finding fault and apportioning blame does not help us to learn from ‘incidents’. The ‘speeding’ driver you mention must have lost control for a reason so we really want to know what that reason is so we can do something to eliminate it.
We now know that all accidents are the result of prediction failure so what did your ‘speeder’ fail to predict? What were the gaps in his knowledge that meant that he was happy at the speed he was travelling? What environmental clues did he miss in order to make his mistaken prediction? If we can find answers to these questions then it becomes much easier to feed those answers back to all the other road users so that they can aviod making the same mistake.
Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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All these comments using accidents as examples when I thought the entire point of the ‘New View’ was to try and avoid an accident in the first place from which ultimately nobody is a winner!
Andy Taylor
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Trevor:
You and others may be missing the point. You can call it blame culture if you wish, but if some individuals are not going to be responsible for their behaviour on the roads while others are, do you think that is a situation that should be tolerated?
Similar question I put to Duncan: If a speeder lost control and wrote off your unattended parked vehicle, would you shrug it off, apologise to him/her for leaving your car in the way and stand the cost of replacement yourself or would you expect them to pay (literally) for their actions as they were to blame, (or ‘responsible’, if you don’t like the word ‘blame’)?
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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What’s a “genuine” accident Paul? One where all involved had absolutely no control over what happened? Acts of God occur obviously, but usually accidents are man-made and therefore preventable.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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I wish you well with this new campaign. It certainly required a new think mode. Whilst its obviously past it conceptional stage and in its infancy there appears to be quite a lot of work yet to be established in order to become an intervention. No doubt you will be conducting some trials and I await to see what the outcome will be. Best of luck.
Bob Craven Lancs Space is Safe Campaigner
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With reference to the use of the term “accident”.
Frank Furedi (The Culture of Fear, Risk taking and the morality of low expectation. Continuum: London, 2002) maintains that when the editors of the British Medical Journal (British Medical Journal 2 June, 2001, p.1320) banned the word ‘accident’ from its pages, their reasoning was that “most injuries are predictable and preventable therefore the word accident should not be used to refer to injuries or events that produce them”.
While accepting that there are occasions whereby events causing injuries may be due to bad luck or ‘acts of God’ even in cases such as avalanches or earthquakes, they claimed that it is possible to take preventative measures simply by adopting precautionary strategies or simply, by not being there in the first place.
Furedi argues that rather than attribute death to an act of God or chance, our culture has moved towards blaming a person or institution. He argues that the development of accident claims companies has taken the responsibility of an accident from the injured person to one of blaming someone else. Therefore what once seemed as a risk worth taking is now open to interpretation as culpable negligence. In our litigious society blame has taken over from personal responsibility (ibid:12).
Finally, in a society which is defensive about risk, concerned with risk avoidance and the prevention of harms, the regulation of risk necessarily attracts public concern which ultimately carries a spectre of blame. Carson (Risking Legal Repercussions’, in H. Kemshall and J. Pritchard (eds) The Politics of Risk Society. Cambridge, 1996) points out that although accidents happen, risks are caused and are thus subject to hindsight scrutiny and open to litigation. The response to the uncertainty of risk and blame is the imposition of regulation through increasing prescriptive rules. Failure to negotiate a risk is considered an individual failure rather than the result of social processes outside of the individual’s control (ibid).
Elaine, Northern Ireland
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Hi Stuart
Yes I used ‘accident’ in this particular case for a number of reasons but suffice to say that I agree with you that the word has been popularly replaced by collision and yes…accident tends to imply a blameless incident.
However, although I used it as an everyday term, I do indeed mean collision…although that is not to suggest that all elements in accident causation is ‘blame worthy’.
There is of course a huge difference between a wilfull non compliance and with ‘safe and responsible road use’ and incidents that are caused by everyday errors and error chains…all of which any one of us may be susceptible to.
Hence the reason why I used ‘accident’ in this context and with my work not only on the NSNA but also with HELI BIKES – Motorcycle Safety Initiative, I discuss at length the collision factors…mostly avoidable but that doesn’t mean they could be avoided because of everyday errors, misperceptions and misunderstandings of how ‘we’ drive or ride, what we should be searching for and what we should be expecting.
Yes indeed over many years I have attended many hundreds of motorcycle collisions and equally other vehicles too and whilst errors are always present and whilst they are overwhelmingly avoidable, the collision of loss of control occurred for very normal everyday reasons and with drivers and riders making errors…hence accidental without intention.
Now, that is not to say that although a collision or loss of control was not intentional it should not be punished but we would say that we need to know why the action took place, what factors led up to that, what errors and error chains were present, what misunderstandings and misperceptions were present and were these attitudinal or were they as a result of poor training history etc.
I digress somewhat, but my interest in this field is specifically to highlight the immediate causes but also to investigate & raise awareness of the root causes…what errors were made, why they were made and most importantly how do we prevent collision causes repeating themselves, either be it for grossly culpable reasons, marginally culpable or for ‘accidental & non intentional’ reasons.
Thanks for your comment and I agree that collision may be a more suitable term for many instances, but in others it may not. Collisions & crashes imply a specific a certain dynamic, whereas accidents & incidents imply a broader dynamic, hence why the latter is used in other industries more so than the popular media ‘crash’ term.
As a final note, probably the most suitable term for this area would be ‘Incident’ as this would imply something that has happened that would need investigation or when we are not certain of the details…possibly a term for the future. Who knows.
Alf Gasparro – Berkshire
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Hugh:
I think you have missed the point and added in the usual blame culture retroric and a juanticed view. Of course in the world of people and lawyers and ambulance chasers there is the emotional feelings of the berieved to be exploted and taken into serious consideration. But isn’t it rather good that this looks at the causes not the blames thus if we have something that does not happen again and improves the realities of everyday life on the roads.
Trevor Baird Northern Ireland
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Sound interesting, Duncan. Some relevance perhaps to J J Leeming’s Prevent or Punish?:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Accidents-Prevent-J-J-Leeming/dp/1897856296
Hugh, of course, willful acts of negligence should be punished, but we also need to recognise genuine accidents. The emotional anti-driver revenge culture has no deserved place in road safety or justice. Some want to punish all 32 million drivers for the irresponsible actions of a few. I can think of at least one ‘charity’ founded on this basis.
Paul Biggs, Staffodshire
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Duncan:
I sense from this and previous postings from you, that you’re not keen on the blame culture of accidents, preferring instead to adopt a more understanding, perhaps even forgiving approach to perpetrators of accidents in which case, if you, or a loved one, were hospitalized by the actions of another road user, or your vehicle was damaged/written off, wouldn’t you be even slightly annoyed at the party responsible? Would you be instructing your insurance company not to pursue damages? Would you be insisting the police did not carry out an investigation with a view to bringing charges against the other party? Supposing he/she was a ‘bad apple’ with a history of offences and accidents – would you not want them to face up to the damage they had done? Theories and clever thinking are fine, but they don’t always help with the realities of everyday life on the roads.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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Those of us who work in RS have for years been looking for the “Something new” for years. Reinventing the wheel can only be done so many times and I for one cannot wait to see what Duncan and the Team produce.
However seeing at it used in the first part of the article “responded to hundreds of motorcycle accidents” then could I ask you start by removing the term accident?
I would suggest Alf has responded to a large number of people making the wrong choice and a few unavoidable accidents.
Think! have agreed to use a different more appropriate word in any future adverts, the HA are taking the matter to their board about what to display on the MATRIX instead of Accident ahead and all the Emergency Services have removed the A and replaced it with RTC.
This may sound picky but to some the word accident still means “could not be helped” whereas all of us who are involved in road safety know this not to be the case. When reporting on the news the presenter always says train crash or air crash, is it not right that we have the same continuity and the right word applied to incidents on the road?
Good luck to what you are trying to achieve and impressing us with the end results.
Stuart Rochdale
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