Dunlap Research is working with Johns Hopkins University on the Older Novice Driver Naturalistic Driving Study for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in collaboration with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), Econometrica, and Clinical Squared.

“In recent years, new drivers have increasingly delayed licensure,” project lead Timothy Wright says. “In the past, new drivers would get their driver’s license as soon as they were legally allowed to do so. Now, more drivers are waiting until they are 18 to 20 years old.

“Historically, these teen drivers are at a higher risk of getting into a motor vehicle crash during the early stages of their tenure as licensed drivers. The Older Novice Driver Naturalistic Driving Study is designed to look at how that risk of getting into a motor vehicle crash changes when drivers delay licensure.”

What does the work on this project look like?

“We are going to partner with a State DMV or State DMVs,” Wright says. “With these partnerships in place, we can recruit both new teen drivers and older novice drivers immediately upon licensure. Once we have driver participants enrolled in the study, we are going to instrument their vehicles and have them download an app on their smartphone so we can record their earliest driving experiences, for up to a full year immediately after licensure.

“We will also be surveying study participants with questions that we expect to be associated with risky driving based on previous research. For example, we will assess their personalities, their mental health outlooks and habits, their relationships with their parents, and their sleep habits. We will be looking at everything that could potentially be risk factors for these novice drivers and comparing the data within and between age groups.”

Why is this an important topic to study?

“Drivers that delay licensure often are not subject to the same license restrictions of those drivers that choose to get a license as soon as they are legally able,” Wright says. “This study will be informative of whether license restrictions may be beneficial to older novices as well. We look forward to riding along with these novice drivers, virtually, for the first year of their driving tenure and getting real data on how they are approaching the task of driving on the roadways, and how risk profiles compare not only between differing age groups of novice drivers, but also amongst drivers with different backgrounds and habits. I think we are going to produce a large dataset that will not only serve this study but also be a springboard for future projects.”