Need Safer Taxi Drivers? Use Psychological Characteristics to Find or Train!

Abstract

Professional drivers play a key role in urban road network safety. It is therefore important to employ safer drivers, also find the problem, and train the existing ones. However, a direct driving test may not be very useful solely because of drivers’ consciousness. This study introduces a latent predictor to expect driving behaviors, by finding the relation between taxi drivers’ psychological characteristics and their driving behaviors. A self-report questionnaire was collected from 245 taxi drivers by which their demographic characteristics, psychological characteristics, and driving behaviors were obtained. The psychological characteristics include instrumental attitude, subjective norm, sensation seeking, aggressive mode, conscientiousness, life satisfaction, premeditation, urgency, and selfishness. Driving behaviors questionnaire (DBQ) provides information regarding drivers’ violations, aggressive violations, errors, and lapses. The standard linear regression model is used to determine the relationship between driving behavior and psychological characteristics of drivers. The findings show that social anxiety and selfishness are the best predictors of the violations; aggressive mode is a significant predictor of the aggressive violations; urgency has a perfect impact on the errors; and finally, life satisfaction, sensation seeking, conscientiousness, age, and urgency are the best predictors of the lapses.