Study: Does The UAE Have A Positive Driving Culture?

This pioneering study wants to shed light on the question: ‘Does the UAE have a positive driving culture?’.

Frederik Bisbjerg, Executive Vice President Retail i-Insured states: “This question is passionately discussed among UAE residents and for sure there are plenty of subjective opinions. Once again, i-Insured and RoadSafetyUAE teamed up to dig a bit deeper in understanding UAE motorists. The aim is to arrive at professionally researched data points helping to streamline the efforts of the involved stakeholders trying to make UAE’s road safer.”

Summarizing the findings, Thomas Edelmann, Managing Director of RoadSafetyUAE shares his opinion: “While the big majority states ‘yes’ we do have a safe and caring road culture, we believe this is a bit of a superficial and hollow statement. When digging deeper, the same respondents lament to the largest part that other motorists do not show a caring attitude, seemingly based on not understanding the ingredients of a safe driving culture, and they can list the biggest causes of non-caring and hence reckless driving, as well as the reasons for it. The UAE wants to further lower accidents, injuries and fatalities, and we have to overcome the feeling that ‘everything is in order’ and we must continue to educating road users about the proper ingredients of a positive driving culture and how to implement it on a daily basis.”

Surprisingly, the top-line answer is 72% ‘yes’ we do have a positive UAE driving culture! This value is even higher (82%) with Expat Arabs, however Westerners have a strongly contrasting view: only 40% state ‘yes’ and 60% ‘no’. This illustrates the paradox of the UAE situation with regards to road safety: based on the ethnic backgrounds and the previous driving experiences vastly gained outside the UAE, the assessment of the overall UAE driving culture varies widely. Among the biggest ethnic demographics (‘Asians’, ‘Arabs’) the perception is very positive, but it must be stated, that this perception can be seen problematic as it might deter further road safety improvements.

90% think, that we ourselves are ‘polite and caring’ drivers. However, only 34% think that other drivers earn the same label! Interesting to see again the divide between Asians (39%) and Westerners (21%) in the assessment of other drivers.

To bring this high-level assessment to live, we surveyed the opinion related to some concrete examples, like ‘How often do you give way to others’: 65% of us claim ‘always/very often’. However, when asked ‘How often do others give way to you’, this value drops to 32%. Like often in research, we have a tendency to rate our own behavior more positively than the one of others and we believe the ‘true’ situation is rather related to the behavior we see from others!

Another example we selected is ‘How often do others thank you when you give way or perform another friendly act’? In total, 39% state ‘always/very often’, but only 5% of Westerners! Which begs the question, what is the proper way to say ‘thank-you’ on UAE’s roads? Raising the right hand like Westerners are used to might be viewed differently by other demographic groups, where hand signs can be interpreted very differently. If a little nod of the head is the right way for Asians/Arabs, this might not even be seen by Westerners, and this might explain the very low 5%?

Mr. Bisbjerg adds: “In order to potentially improve the situation by carving out concrete action points, it was very important for us to get a better understanding about ‘The most unfriendly acts’ we experience on the roads, as well as the reasons behind these unfriendly and dangerous acts.”.

It is interesting to see, that the top most unfriendly acts correlate with the main causes of death on our roads! Even more important is the insight into the causes behind these unfriendly acts: once again and as uncovered in some of our earlier studies, ‘Time pressure – Running late’ is the main culprit for misbehavior and reckless driving! We repeat ourselves by stating that we need a strong education and awareness push towards proper time management. We must leave early and plan for possible delays on our routes!

In addition, the lack of knowledge about polite and caring behavior is lamented by respondents, coupled with the believe of low education in this regard. Deliberate acts (37%) and the anonymity in our vehicles (36%) also score high.

“We recently launched a new topic on our on-line portal about RoadSafetyUAE’s view of the ’10 Golden Rules for creating a positive UAE driving culture’, which can be found on http://www.roadsafetyuae.com/10-golden-rules-positive-uae-driving-culture/.  We wish, that as many road users as possible could be exposed to these rules, in order to create the positive UAE driving culture we all long for.”, Edelmann concludes.

The study was commissioned by i-Insured and RoadSafetyUAE and was conducted by YouGov in February 2018, based on the views of a representative sample of 1,004 UAE residents.