Relationship between socio-demographic of drivers and traffic violations and crashes involvements

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the interrelationships between the socio-demographic characteristics of the drivers and their behaviour in terms of the historical records of traffic rule violations and crashes. Individual driver's data were collected and integrated from four different databases over eight years from 2008 to 2015. A total of 608,611 individual driver's records of violations and crashes were employed in the analysis. The examined drivers' demographics variables included: gender, age, nationality, number years of driving experience, occupation, level of education, marital status and number of vehicles owned by the driver. Drivers have been grouped based on their demographics and violation records and then the crash rates of both property damage only (PDO) crashes and severe crashes were calculated for each group. The analysis showed a strong relationship between number of drive's violations and crash rates. In addition, the demographic characteristics of the drives have a significant impact on the value of the crash rates. male, young (18-24 years) older drivers (greater than 65 years), local nationality, high number of owned vehicle by driver, low educated and drivers who work as a driver have higher crash rates compared to others. Two different models were developed to estimate the variables that significant affect the frequency occurrence of the PDO and severe crash of drivers by applying the Negative Binomial Regression approach. The results confirmed the findings of the two-way data analysis regarding the drivers' demographics. In addition, it showed that some variables are significant in the occurrence of the PDO crashes and not significant in severe crashes such drivers' nationality (Asians), mobile usage and seat-belt violators. in addition, the results showed that speeding and tailgating violation types significantly affect the occurrence of the both types of crashes.