IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0188951.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Blind haste: As light decreases, speeding increases

Author

Listed:
  • Emanuel de Bellis
  • Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck
  • Wernher Brucks
  • Andreas Herrmann
  • Ralph Hertwig

Abstract

Worldwide, more than one million people die on the roads each year. A third of these fatal accidents are attributed to speeding, with properties of the individual driver and the environment regarded as key contributing factors. We examine real-world speeding behavior and its interaction with illuminance, an environmental property defined as the luminous flux incident on a surface. Drawing on an analysis of 1.2 million vehicle movements, we show that reduced illuminance levels are associated with increased speeding. This relationship persists when we control for factors known to influence speeding (e.g., fluctuations in traffic volume) and consider proxies of illuminance (e.g., sight distance). Our findings add to a long-standing debate about how the quality of visual conditions affects drivers’ speed perception and driving speed. Policy makers can intervene by educating drivers about the inverse illuminance‒speeding relationship and by testing how improved vehicle headlights and smart road lighting can attenuate speeding.

Suggested Citation

  • Emanuel de Bellis & Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck & Wernher Brucks & Andreas Herrmann & Ralph Hertwig, 2018. "Blind haste: As light decreases, speeding increases," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(1), pages 1-14, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0188951
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0188951
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188951
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188951&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0188951?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert J. Snowden & Nicola Stimpson & Roy A. Ruddle, 1998. "Speed perception fogs up as visibility drops," Nature, Nature, vol. 392(6675), pages 450-450, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alicja Barbara Sołowczuk & Dominik Kacprzak, 2021. "Identification of the Determinants of the Effectiveness of On-Road Chicanes in the Village Transition Zones Subject to a 50 km/h Speed Limit," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(13), pages 1-25, July.
    2. Tobias Schlager & Emanuel de Bellis & JoAndrea Hoegg, 2020. "How and when weather boosts consumer product valuation," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 48(4), pages 695-711, July.
    3. Haiyue Liu & Chuanyun Fu & Chaozhe Jiang & Yue Zhou & Chengyuan Mao & Jining Zhang, 2020. "Bayesian hierarchical spatial count modeling of taxi speeding events based on GPS trajectory data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-17, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chen Zhao & Xia Zhao & Zhao Li & Qiong Zhang, 2022. "XGBoost-DNN Mixed Model for Predicting Driver’s Estimation on the Relative Motion States during Lane-Changing Decisions: A Real Driving Study on the Highway," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-23, June.
    2. Tan, Jin-hua, 2019. "Impact of risk illusions on traffic flow in fog weather," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 525(C), pages 216-222.
    3. Mahdi Rezapour & Khaled Ksaibati, 2022. "Identification of factors associated with various types of impaired driving," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-11, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0188951. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.