Driving is my passion. I’ve started driving since I was in third year high school. I love driving but city driving in Metro Manila is really horrible. I feel like I’m always in danger while sharing the street with PUVs. Others say that the key to a safe driving is defensive driving. For me, that doesn’t work in the streets of Metro Manila. I should say that a lot of PUV drivers are really aggressive and abusive. I’m sure you also have your own story of how these big monsters along EDSA almost scared you to death but more than that, how dangerous is it when we go out of the metro and pass through highways.
A study was done by Rob Gray and David Regan 10 years ago about risky driving behaviours. They studied the consequences of motion adaptation for visually guided motor action outside the laboratories. Overtaking and passing maneuvers in highways was one of their focuses. As a driver, one of the latest skills that I learned was overtaking. Especially in the Philippines, overtaking is very dangerous. The streets are kind of narrow and there are a lot of cars. On the other hand, overtaking is inevitable in the Philippines. PUV doesn’t have loading and unloading zones which cause them to always slow down and stop. Although patience is a virtue, there are still days that you need to rush in order to come in time for a class or a meeting. In general, a lot of major accidents in the road happen because of overtaking and passing maneuvers.
Although the study was done in the United States, which roads are completely different in the Philippines, they found that overtaking is really risky especially when the driver is just staring at a blank space. This may be due to fatigue effect if there is prolonged driving or because the visual perception of the driver overestimates the motion of the vehicle. You might wonder how the experimenters came up with this generalization. Their experiment was a bit costly because they used fixed-base driving simulator composed of the frontal two-thirds of a Nissan 240SX convertible and a wide-field-of-view (60° horizontal X 40° vertical) display of a simulated driving scene. Octane workstation (Silicon Graphics Inc.) fixed and edited the scene. It was projected onto a wall 3.5 m in front of the driver with a Barco 800G projector and was continually changed at an average rate of 15 frames/s in correspondence with the movement of the car. (I’m not really a techie person but I just can imagine how elegant their setup is) I really wish that I have been a participant in this study. Each participant is given 10 minutes to be comfortable with the system before they were asked to perform the overtaking trial. The instruction was pretty easy: overtake the car just like as how you’d do in a real highway. With this, they came up with a conclusion that adaptation to retinal image expansion has a dramatic effect on overtaking maneuvers. They also found out that observers drove significantly faster in the adaptation condition than in either of the baseline conditions. This means that drivers drive faster when they see an empty road, perceiving less visual motion.
This may explain why there are a lot of accidents in provincial buses in the Philippines nowadays. There might be a fatigue effect and they might not see much road signs which sends visual motion to them. They tend to overestimate that they could overtake anytime without any collisions. Maybe this study can call the attention of the MMDA and DPWH in dealing with accidents. I hope that there’s still a chance for the Philippines to be a safer place for driving. And in addition to that, I hope that there will be more attempts to study the driver’s visual perception in the Philippines’ setting.
Gray, R and Megan, D (2000) Risky Driving Behavior: A Consequence of Motion Adaptation for Visually Guided Motor Action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 2000, Vol. 26, No. 6, 1721-1732. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xhp2661721.pdf
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