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 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.