Abstract
Road traffic plays a vital role in countries’ economic growth and future development. However, traffic accidents are considered a major public health issue affecting humankind. Despite efforts by governments to improve traffic safety, the misalignment between the policy efforts and on-ground infringements, distractions and breaches reflect the regulatory failure. This paper uses the Bayesian network method to investigate unsafe behaviors and traffic accidents involving unlicensed drivers as a perspective for the regulatory alignment assessment. The findings suggest that: (1) unlicensed drivers are more likely to have unsafe driving behaviors; (2) the probability of being involved in a severe traffic accident increases when the drivers are unlicensed and decreases in the case of licensed drivers; (3) young drivers are noticeably more likely to engage in unsafe behaviors, usually leading to serious injuries and deaths, when their driving licenses are invalid; (4) women are more likely to engage in right-of-way violations and to have collisions with no serious injuries, contrary to unlicensed men drivers, who are involved in other types of traffic accidents resulting in serious injuries.
Highlights
Traffic safety has become a major public health concern all around the world [1,2,3]
Whereas previous studies discussed unlicensed driving mainly as part of unsafe driving behaviors, this paper considers it as a separate risk behavior: it investigates the behaviors of the unlicensed drivers and elaborates the mechanism by which their behaviors are influenced by demographic factors so as to proactively measure the regulatory alignment and enable policymakers to set proper corrections
Despite the improvements in the legislation and enforcement of laws targeting many traffic risk factors [52] and the fact that the drivers are aware of the adverse outcomes of engaging in unsafe driving behaviors, regulatory breaches continue to be witnessed and severe injuries, disabilities and deaths caused by traffic accidents continue to be recorded
Summary
Traffic safety has become a major public health concern all around the world [1,2,3]. The first approach focuses on advancing engineering and enhancing traffic infrastructures, and the second approach is interested in the driver’s individual factors and driving behaviors. These two approaches are complementary to each other within the systems perspective of Vision. This global vision is conditioned by the efficiency of the abovementioned approaches and involves a mix of initiatives to address safe mobility issues, i.e., vehicle safety, safety of infrastructures and promotion of road users’ behaviors [10,11]
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