Quantifying the Benefits of Mindful Driving Training in Safety and Sustainability

Abstract

While automobiles are essential for enabling the daily lives of many Americans and businesses, they have caused significant public health concerns, including over 31,785 fatalities in 2022 from traffic crashes and generating 27% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. It has been shown that mindful driving training reduces aggressive driving behaviors, which is expected to reduce crashes, fuel consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions.In this research, we work with the University of Virginia (UVA)'s Facilities Management (FM) group which monitors over 280 vehicles through GPS tracking software. The FM group started mindful driving training in March 2021 and has since completed training for nearly half of drivers. We started collecting and analyzing these vehicles' performance data, including harsh braking, hard acceleration, speed violation, seatbelt violation, fuel consumption, and idling time. We quantified the impacts of mindful driving using before and after analysis. The safety impact was assessed using delta changes in harsh braking, speed violation, seatbelt violation, and number of relative crashes and the sustainability impact was based on the changes in hard acceleration, fuel economy, and idling time. Our analyses showed that mindful driving training greatly improves sustainability with reduced fuel consumption and safety with reduced occurrences of safetyrelated violations.