Exploring the relationship between traffic resilience and driver behaviors through traffic climate

Abstract

Traffic safety culture and climate have emerged as an integral part of road safety policy and practice in recent decades, resulting in an emphasis on a holistic approach to road safety through systems thinking. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between drivers' perceptions of traffic resilience and traffic climate and their impact on driver behaviors. A total of 216 drivers aged between 19 and 32 years completed an online questionnaire consisting of the Traffic Resilience Scale (TRS), the Traffic Climate Scale (TCS), the Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ), and the Positive Driver Behaviors Scale (PDBS). Serial mediation analyses were conducted to examine the objectives of the study. The results showed that drivers who perceived the traffic system as more resilient tended to perceive the traffic system as more functional and less externally demanding. The drivers' perceptions of traffic resilience were found to be directly related to the traffic climate and indirectly related to the driver behaviors through external affective demands and internal requirements. Increased traffic resilience was associated with increased aberrant behaviors and decreased positive behaviors through reduced external affective demands and internal requirements. These findings can be considered to make a unique contribution to the literature in understanding the motivations behind aberrant behaviors of drivers and highlight the need for road safety policies to take into account road users' perceptions of traffic resilience and traffic climate in order to better understand, predict, and modify road user behaviors for a safer traffic system.