Fatal and Serious Road Crashes Involving Young Drivers in New Zealand: A Latent Class Clustering Approach

The over-representation of young drivers in road crashes and injuries is a major ongoing concern world-wide. This study offers a classification analysis of young-drivers’ serious and fatal crashes as a decision-aid for designing youth targeted road safety programs. Latent class analysis was applied to police records of serious and fatal crashes involving 15-24 year-old drivers in New Zealand to provide a comprehensive and multi-dimensional overview of crash patterns. The analysis yielded 15 and 8 latent classes of single- and multi-vehicle crashes and raised three major safety concerns for young drivers: (i) risky road behavior involving reckless driving and traffic law violations; (ii) inattention, error, and hazard perception problems; (iii) interaction with difficult road geometry and lighting conditions, especially on open roads and state highways with a 90 km/h or higher speed limit.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB30 Operator Education and Regulation. Alternate title: Fatal and Serious Road Crashes Involving Young Drivers in New Zealand: Latent Class Clustering Approach
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Weiss, Harold
  • Kaplan, Sigal
  • Prato, Carlo Giacomo
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 24p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Cluster analysis; Crash causes; Fatalities; Geometric design; Recently qualified drivers; Risk taking; Street lighting; Traffic crashes; Young adults
• Uncontrolled Terms: Distracted drivers
• Geographic Terms: New Zealand
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure; I83: Accidents and the Human Factor;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01519716
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-1604
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 26 2014 10:07AM