Road testing

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It’s human nature to think that we are better at driving than we actually are. We may know what we are supposed to do to prepare our vehicle before starting out on a long journey – or the right steps to take in the event of breaking down – but the reality may look very different.

Likewise, we don’t tolerate speeding or tailgating by other drivers, but may engage in the same negative behaviours ourselves. “People blame other people. They always say, ‘oh, it was the other person who stopped or braked sharply’,” says Manjit Galsinh, head of insight at Highways England.

The perception gap between reported and actual behaviour is an issue facing all researchers. For Highways England’s insight team, however, tackling this is imperative to identifying and addressing the biggest misconceptions among drivers – and could, ultimately, help to save lives.

The organisation has recently embarked on a behaviour-change programme, with a particular focus on road safety, as it looks to dig deeper into people’s understanding and experience of driving.

As the government organisation responsible for operating, maintaining and improving England’s motorways and major trunk roads, Highways England looks after the strategic road network. This totals 4,300 miles and carries a third of all traffic in England by mileage, and two-thirds of all heavy goods traffic. In short, maintaining it is a huge job, and understanding drivers’ behaviour is just as gargantuan a task – particularly when driving is often something we do without full awareness of the decisions we make.

Sitting within the corporate affairs and communications directorate, Highways England’s nine-person insight and evaluation team is responsible for ensuring that the organisation’s road-safety campaigns are rooted in insight, with the aim of supporting three imperatives: safety, delivery and customer service.

“We capture and unify the customer voice so it can inform our decisions and influence campaign messaging – ultimately to improve safety on the network,” says Galsinh. “We also support our improvement schemes to ensure the views of the customer are always considered.”

The insights programme is often geared around increasing understanding of specific themes, because – without up-to-date insights – it is difficult for Highways England to make decisions. One area it has been focusing on recently is breakdowns – specifically, drivers’ understanding of what to do in the event that their vehicle malfunctions on the motorway.

Previous research by the organisation had highlighted that fear of breakdowns was a source of anxiety for many motorists, so it decided to take a new approach to the issue – looking at how that insight could influence campaign messaging and lead to behavioural change.

“Although people have breakdown cover, they tend to put the documents in a drawer and don’t store emergency numbers in their phones – so breaking down has massive safety implications, particularly if there’s a misunderstanding about what you’re supposed to do,” says Galsinh. “Reasonable, rational, average drivers can still break the rules and do irrational things.”

Highways England worked with Irrational Agency on the research, to understand the experience of road users and people’s perceptions of what they should do if their vehicle breaks down. The agency first conducted qualitative research, followed by implicit testing methods where drivers were asked what they would do in specific situations – for instance, whether they would remain in the vehicle after breaking down on the motorway, whether pets should be left in the car, and whether a red warning triangle should be put out.

Implicit tools were used to uncover the processes that underlined participants’ decision-making. They had a limited amount of time to answer because the researchers wanted to gain more clarity on people’s initial, intuitive impulses.

“It was a very implicit response to understand what they would do, because you don’t have a lot of time to think if you are in that particular situation,” says Pankti Shah, behavioural economist at Irrational Agency.

The research identified some confusion among respondents about breakdown advice, particularly how it differs for smart motorways, where there is active traffic management such as variable speed limits and hard shoulders. It also found that the principle of least effort runs through all drivers. This often leads to over-reliance on car technology, and drivers forming shortcuts or heuristics – such as MOTs and annual services – so they don’t check their car before going on a long journey. The issue is complicated further by the fact that people’s cognitive ability is likely to shrink when they panic.

Again, one of the challenging aspects of the research, according to Shah, was trying to get to people’s underlying consciousness. “When you talk to people, especially in a qual space, they say, ‘of course I know what to do when I break down’ – but we knew that wasn’t true. So it was challenging to make them feel comfortable to admit that, actually, they wouldn’t know what to do.”

Likewise, people would say they always check their tyres, adds Shah, “because it’s all default; of course you do that – but do you actually do it? There is a difference-between-intention-and-action gap there.”

The research highlighted the need for short, sharp messaging that would be memorable for drivers in a panicked, breakdown situation. “This project has the potential to influence safety on the network, so it was a high priority for us – especially if it can reinforce the safety message and help save lives,” says Galsinh. 

The findings are being fed into campaign development and shared internally, with a view to influencing the delivery plans of safety teams. Internally, there is a “massive appetite” for behavioural insights that have the potential to lead to behaviour change through campaigns, engineering or education, adds Galsinh.

“Ultimately, if we can change negative behaviours we can save lives, so anything that helps in that respect is always most welcome,” he says.

The insight team still links much of the innovative behavioural work to traditional methodologies, however, regularly mixing various methodologies and sources of insight to gain more depth on an issue. “It will depend on the project requirements and what level of evidence and robustness is needed,” says Galsinh, “but we try to do it to validate and test our understanding, and explore whether there’s anything we’ve missed.”

Often, it comes down to giving the right type of information, depending on the stakeholder internally, he says. “Some people are comfortable with numbers and others are happy with the qualitative approach – it’s just about meeting everyone’s needs.”

Using techniques such as facial coding or eye tracking – which the organisation employed to test reactions to the new yellow emergency breakout bays on smart motorways, as well as in its tailgating research (see panel) – isn’t an exact science, says Galsinh, but it does offer “an extra layer” of insight that can be useful.

“It can be quite objective – rather than having an ethnographer noting down facial expressions it’s good to have a piece of technology that automates it and does it on a consistent basis.”

In terms of ongoing monitoring and measurement, Highways England conducts a monthly longitudinal survey of 1,800 road users across England, to establish baselines and monitor fluctuations over time.

Questions range from asking road users about specific stretches of motorway to their view of Highways England’s reputation – so the survey also acts as an “early warning system”, says Galsinh, highlighting emerging themes and priorities, such as customer perceptions of a new roadworks scheme.

“It might be that we’ve got communications around a scheme wrong – it allows us to be really responsive to those customer needs.”

The team also undertakes reputational and stakeholder surveys, and produces dashboards that mine social media platforms for supplementary insights to give context to quantitative data. It is now creating libraries of insight products and looking at investing in self-service tools, automated reports and data dashboards, to open up access to the insight function’s services within the wider organisation.

As a government body, measuring campaign impact is a key priority, so it has recently created an evaluation function within the insights team to support continuous improvements, track progress in campaign delivery and suggest improvements to future campaigns. But what about measuring behaviour change in the long term?

Survey data is only one aspect of a wider evidence base helping Highways England assess the impact of campaigns – government data, such as killed or seriously injured casualty statistics, may also be used.

“We could make a leap of faith that, because there’s been a reduction in KSIs – because of reductions in tailgating or speeding – it could be as a result of a campaign. It’s obviously very difficult to prove cause and effect, but it does give us an indication of how successful a campaign has been.”

This article was first published in Issue 25 of Impact.