American and Saudi Arabian College Students: A Comparison of Road Traffic Accidents

Abstract

The traffic accident characteristics of a random sample of 600 students from four colleges and universities in the U.S. and a stratified random sample of 1000 university students from two institutions of higher education in Saudi Arabia were examined. While 41 percent of the U.S. sample students owned their own cars, 83 percent of the Saudi students sampled owned at least one auto. Over 100 of these car-owning Saudi students did not hold driver's licenses. The percentage of students surveyed who had not experienced any road traffic accidents were 55 and 20.5 for the American and the Saudi samples, respectively. The mean number of traffic accidents per Saudi student was 1.28 which is nearly double that of college students in the U.S. The average fatality rate of the Saudi college student was 25 times that of their American counterparts. While 49.4 percent of the U.S. college student accidents were caused by drugs and alcohol, more than 40 percent of the total Saudi college student accidents were caused by high speed.