Cross Sectional Crash Severity Analysis among Various Vehicle Driver Characteristics

Abstract

The current study evaluated road crashes in three categories of drivers: passenger car drivers, heavy vehicle drivers and pickup truck drivers. The crash data of road crashes that occurred from 2009 to 2012 in Iranian suburban roads were analyzed. The crashes involved 194,041 damage, 9,677 injury and 1,303 fatality crashes. Because of the ordinal nature of crash severity, ordered logit model was selected for each vehicle driver category. In the passenger car driver category, the independent variables of driver’s gender, driver’s age and driver’s educational level (uneducated, less than high school diploma, high school diploma) were obtained for modeling; in the heavy vehicle driver category, the independent variables of driver’s age and driver’s educational level (uneducated, less than high school diploma) were obtained for modeling, and in the pickup truck driver category, the independent variables of driver’s age and driver’s educational level (uneducated, high school diploma) were obtained for modeling. The variable of driver’s gender with respect to passenger cars shows that crashes by female drivers are more severe than those involving male drivers in suburban roads. Regarding the variable of driver’s age, if the driver’s age increases in each vehicle driver category, the probability of occurrence of a severe crash will decrease. The variable of driver’s educational level shows that the severity of crashes involving a driver that has a low level of education is more compared with a driver that has a high level of education.