GPS Tracking Study Reveals Drivers Will Slow Down – For a Price
25 Jun 2012
Researchers think they have discovered a new way to motivate motorists to drive within safe driving speeds. Apparently, money talks — and it is just the ticket (pun intended) to get drivers to slow down.
In a study funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), researchers from Old Dominion University, Western Michigan University, NHTSA installed GPS tracking devices in a group of motorists’ cars. The drivers were told that the GPS tracking device would not only monitor and track their driving speed, but also compare it to the posted speed limit for a period of a week.
At the end of the week, any driver that that was found to be driving safely would be given a cash prize of $25.
The researchers found that the financial incentive paid off. Overall, violations of speeding were reduced, including motorists driving over nine miles per hour (mph) over the speed limit.
“We found that the incentive system was incredibly effective in getting drivers to reduce their speeding,” said Ian Reagan, a traffic safety researcher at NHTSA and one of the study’s authors. “Egregious speed limit violations were almost eliminated — that’s driving nine or more [miles per hour] over the speed limit.”
Although cold hard cash was a motivator to abide by speed limits, so was a penalty. Test group motorists were told that they would lose three cents form their prize money any time they exceeded the speed limit by five to eight mph. What’s more, any time they exceeded the speed limit by more than 9 mph, the penalty double. That is, they lost six cents from their prize money.
“At least one driver said they made a game out of it,” Reagan said. “They wanted to see if they could keep that incentive amount of $25.”
Clearly the GPS tracking devices worked to reduce speeding when tied to a financial incentive. While it might not be a realistic or practical option to have them in every motor vehicle, insurance companies may see them as a way to reduce vehicular accidents, and therefore lower car insurance premiums.
Government statistics say that nearly 12,000 Americas die as a result of traffic accidents caused by speeding.
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