A picture of European car drivers:
the SARTRE project

SARTRE is an acronym for ‘Social Attitudes to Road Traffic Risk in Europe’.
The SARTRE group started to look at safety on European roads in 1991 by conducting the same driver surveys in each country. The first SARTRE study was conducted in 15 countries, the second, conducted five years later, was expanded to include 19 countries.

The latest, called SARTRE 3, was carried out in 23 countries. Each country surveyed around 1,000 drivers so that, in total, approximately 24,000 drivers were interviewed. The surveys provide information on driver attitudes, behaviour and experiences (e.g. of enforcement activity) and therefore provide an excellent opportunity to compare drivers in different countries and identify measures that could improve behaviour and safety both in individual countries and throughout Europe.

This document is intended to report some of the main findings of the SARTRE survey to a Europe-wide audience. In particular it compares the attitudes and behaviour of drivers, examines how drivers feel about traffic regulations, considers how cultural and social factors influence safety and discusses which measures could be taken to make European drivers safer.
The SARTRE 3 surveys show that most drivers are concerned about road safety, recognise that driver behaviour is a very important factor in contributing to road safety and also report that they frequently engage in dangerous and illegal behaviours. This means that if the European Commission is to achieve its target of reducing traffic fatalities by a half by the year 2010, all drivers have an important role to play; the message is that we all need to play our part and modify our behaviour behind the wheel.

This, in all probability, means each of us!

Although the findings of such surveys can sometimes be questioned, especially face-to-face ones such as used by the SARTRE group, with some people tending to give socially acceptable answers, the results reported here are sufficiently strong to allow us to paint a picture of European drivers, even if this picture is changing over time.

Some of the findings of the study that relate to self-reported risk taking, attitudes towards various countermeasures and possible ways of improving road user safety are reported here. How do the results fit in with how you think?