Our Head of Research Dr Robert Isler has been very busy lately! Read on for some info on the two most recent conferences he played a leading role at...
In June 2016, he travelled all the way to sunny Madrid to talk to an international audience at the 48th CIECA Congress. The organisation is the International Commission for Driver Testing, and it was an honour to be invited by them to speak. Robert presented a talk called the ‘Ultimate, Evidence-based, five-star driver training programme of the future’. He talked about his decades of experience in the field, and how he’s put everything he knows together into one programme: you guessed it, Fleetcoach!
Then in August, it was over to Brisbane (again to the warmer weather!) to present two talks and chair a session. This time it was at the Sixth International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP2016).
His first presentation here was on the link between good hazard perception and speed choice. To sum up his findings, essentially those people with better hazard perception skills are also better at choosing an appropriate speed. They’ll go slower when there are more hazards, and be able to scan faster and match their speed when conditions are safer, with less hazards. That supports all the findings that Fleetcoach is built on: that good hazard perception (spotting the risky stuff all around us) is crucial to good safe driving.
He also presented on the connection between life satisfaction and safe driving. It’s long been thought that the way we drive is not just an isolated part of our life. A holistic perspective says that if we are well fed, not tired, have some good coping strategies for dealing with life in general… we’ll also be better behind the wheel. Robert’s recent studies have shown that general life satisfaction, that is, wellbeing in life in general makes for better, safer drivers. At Fleetcoach we focus on so many different aspects of driving, and this helps us remember why we do the work we do.
Robert came back from these international conferences excited about the future of road safety, and we were thrilled to have even more evidence to point to when we say Fleetcoach is evidence based, scientifically proven… which means it really does work.
If you have any questions about Robert’s research, we’d love to hear from you.
And, if you’d like to read more about the research around hazard perception, this is a good place to start.
