An Investigation of the Relationship between Traffic Enforcement and the Perceived Risk of Detection for Driving Offences

The report presents the results of a survey of 3,700 licensed drivers in Victoria, Australia, concerning their experiences of speed and drink-driving enforcement and their perceptions of the risk of detection for speeding and drink-driving. Exploratory analyses of the data indicate that there were five groups of correlated items. These related to the perceived risk of detection for drink driving and exposure to drink driving; exposure to drink-driving and speed enforcement in general; the perceived risk of detection for speeding; the type of driving exposure of respondents; and the recency of contact with enforcement. These factors were largely independent, with the exception of the two perceived risk factors which were moderately correlated. The factor analysis results were used to investigate similarities between drivers in a cluster analysis, where it was shown that there were six groups of respondents defined in terms of their experiences with and attitudes to enforcement activity which differed on a number of other survey measures.