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

摘要

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