Okay, there are inherent problems with simulators, but I think Sam's had a good idea. What we really want to test is whether driving priorities change in the presence of speed cameras and/or different styles of enforcement, and sadly I don't think TPTB will be persuaded to co-operate by turning 'em all off in the real world. I don't think the problem of not being a perfectly realistic simulation (shadows under cars, horizons etc) is a huge one providing we don't try to test any changes there. In any case I think simulated urban driving would be the way to go since simualted motorway driving would tell us a lot less anyhow. The big problem is the one g_attrill identified - the stakes aren't the same in a simulator. Even paying test subjects £100 and docking them all of it isn't going to be enough as I think more drivers fear the points than the fine. Plus of course witholding some or all of the payment isn't such a big deal as they didn't have that money when they walked in the door.
Assuming that could be overcome I think there'd need to be more groups in the test.
- One with zero enforcement, possibly as the control group.
- Another one should have the sort of discretionary enforcement we'd like to see, perhaps by having a trafplod or ex-trafplod nominate a lurking site in the simulation and then being given the info on how the subject was driving at that location. If there was an offence the trafplod could then say whether he'd give a ticket, stern lecture, advice or ignore it. Subjects would be told that there may be virtual trafplod about.
- One should have conditions close to the original intention for cameras - perhaps small numbers of scams in dodgy areas set to pick off warp speed drivers, perhaps also with discretionary trafplod as above. At the least subjects should be told that there may be trafplod present in the simulation.
- One should have close to real world conditions at the moment - fairly good chance of being caught at 10%+2 or more with visible scams
- Another one could be just the same but with very hard to spot scams. The idea here is that if, as we think, visible scams can distract, would distraction be lessened by invisible or would drivers be even more distracted because they spend all their time trying to spot the damn things.
I think it would also be interesting if it were possible to include other road users in the sim and model their behaviour on that of the test subject. Obviously that would carry the assumption that the test subject is typical of all the virtual traffic in the sim, but if we expect distraction in the test subject it's not an unreasonable assumption. If that were possible it would probably be better to try it out on only half of each group and have the virtual traffic in the other half all behaving in an ideal way. That way we could get an insight not only into how individuals change in response to the risk of getting pinged and whether their risk level changes, but also what might be happening on a wider scale. If there is distraction I'd expect only the testee to be at more risk when the virtual traffic is behaving ideally, but chaos when their standard of driving determines that of the rest of the simulated road users.
Another test could be done on real roads with real drivers, and would knock all the simulator problems on the head. Stick a mini video camera in the dash, preferably as near to the speedo as possible, and point it straight up at the drivers face. There would be a second camera pointing at the road ahead as close as possible to the driver's viewpoint (probably on top of the dash cowling). Both videos would be time stamped, or if the cameras could both go to the same tape in a sort of split screen arrangement that'd be even better. The idea is that the driver would just trundle round as they would normally and the video cameras would record what's ahead and how the driver reacts. In particular it would record how much time the driver spends looking at the dash when they come across a scamera or Talivan
. While you can't change the scenario from cameras to no cameras like you could with a simulator, you can at least drive in different areas and see how much time is spent speedo watching in the most scam infested areas of the country compared to areas with very few scams (or maybe even Durham
). The big plus is that it's all in the real world, with real points if you get pinged and real hospital food if you end up in a tree. It would probably be cheaper than designing a simulator scenario as well. Couple of wireless home security cameras would do, and you can get them about matchbox sized now for not a huge amount. No idea how much a VCR that can do split screen recording, though. I imagine it would be one of those ones normally used for CCTV in shops, but with wireless cameras it might be a realistic alternative to record to a laptop. I'm only thinking about testing the speedo watching effect of Gatsos with this, but maybe with more cams or different set-ups could it be adapted for other purposes?
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. You'd certainly get much more info using the proper gear, not just speedo checks round scameras but also what happens in places where the authorities have gone crazy with signs and street furniture 
, what happens in different sorts of traffic calming 
, the effects of under dressed supermodels on billboards 
and so on. But it occurred to me that if all you wanted to test was speedo checks it could probably be done easily and cheaply with the two wireless camera set-up. All we'd need to record is where the driver looks when a camera appears on the road ahead.
. It'd be interesting to create a map of UK roads that showed where drivers do most speedo checks. 
Better yet, if we knew the vehicle speeds while the speedo checks were going on we could work out distances covered during speedo checks as well. That might tell us if scams create a greater or lesser degree of distraction on faster roads.
