Promoting safe overtaking of horses and cyclists with mindfulness techniques

Inappropriate overtaking is one of the key problems faced by cyclists and horse riders.

Drivers overtake too close and too fast for a number of reasons: they may not know what distances and speeds are safe to adopt when overtaking; they may be prompted by negative attitudes towards a particular group of VRUs; or they may be responding to in-the-moment emotions, such as frustration or anxiety.

We created four videos to impart knowledge and provide mindfulness techniques to car drivers faced with VRUs in the road ahead. We compared our mindfulness videos to a series of control videos (on hands-free phones) and found participants in the intervention group changed their future intended speeds when overtaking horses and cyclists.

Our videos influenced future anticipated emotions and general intentions to pass cyclists safely, though attitudes towards horses were already very favourable. The project also provides an effective protocol for the development and evaluation of road safety videos.

David CrundallProfessor David Crundall, Nottingham Trent University

David Crundall is a Professor of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), where he specialises in Traffic and Transport Psychology and leads the Transport Research in Psychology group (TRiP).

Outside of the university he is the chair of the Road User Behaviour Working Group for the UK Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) and is an affiliate of UKROEd, and writes course content for the UK’s National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme.

He is also one of the co-founders of Esitu Solutions Ltd, a spin-out company from NTU with a mission to bring hazard perception assessment and training to the professional driver and fleet markets. He has won nearly £5 million in research grants and has published over 100 academic papers in the field.