Understanding the Psychology of Roanoke Rear-End Crashes

According to Inside Science, more than 1.8 million rear-end accidents are reported each year within the United States. In total, these types of crashes cause account for nearly one-third of all injury-related U.S. accidents.

Why do so many rear-end accidents happen in Roanoke, Rocky Mount, Franklin County and Southwest Virginia and throughout the rest of the country? A rear-end accident lawyer knows that determining the reasons for rear-end crashes is important to changing driver behavior and making the roads safer.

Understanding the Psychology of Rear-End Accidents

An article published by Visual Expert took a close look at the psychology behind rear-end accidents. The author, a PhD who focuses on analyzing collisions, believes understanding why rear-end crashes happen requires determining why drivers are normally able to stop and then figuring out why motorists cannot perform this task successfully in particular situations.

The key issue when it comes to rear-end accidents is not visibility, as many of these crashes happen on straight roads during daytime hours when there are no weather problems. Instead, one reason for so many rear-end crashes is motion perception.

Drivers constantly see cars ahead of them on the roads, so just having a vehicle in front of you doesn’t mean you need to brake. You must be able to effectively determine when you are closing in on the car in front of you and make an assessment of the time-to-collision. You typically do this subconsciously using optical image transformation.

Headway, the amount of highway space in between your car and the vehicle in front of you, is not an effective way to determine if a crash is imminent and most drivers don’t really pay attention to it. Instead, looming motion is the key to assessing whether you’re going to hit the car in front of you or not.

Looming motion helps you to identify the time to collision but doesn’t give you information on whether any response is necessary on your part. Drivers don’t respond as soon as looming is perceptible because drivers often travel closely behind a car.

In fact, the instantaneous time to collision is 1.5 seconds, but drivers sometimes leave this amount or even less headway between their car and the vehicle in front. This is because drivers don’t expect the lead vehicle to suddenly brake hard.

The decision to brake thus depends upon looming motion, vehicle capability, the possible response alternatives, and the possible consequences associated with braking sharply or turning suddenly. The problem is, most drivers don’t have enough accurate information on all of these factors to make the right choices in emergency situations When a driver has determined that he has four seconds to avoid a crash, he has to decide what he should do. Since drivers haven’t likely ever slammed on the brakes at 60 MPH, they have no direct experience of whether hitting the brakes at that point will be helpful or harmful.

Without direct experience, drivers have a situation without a learned response or a script. A stopped vehicle in a car’s path that a vehicle is about to hit thus constitutes an “error trap” likely to cause many motorists to become involved in a collision.

If you have been injured, contact Davis, Davis, Davis & Davis, PC today at 866-434-1581  to schedule a consultation.  Serving Roanoke, Rocky Mount, Franklin County and Southwest Virginia. 

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