Abstract
Older adults (aged 65 or older) are at higher risk of involvement in motor vehicle crashes. Many studies have been conducted on older road users’ safety, but how older people’s driving behavior and demographic characteristics, and warnings of side effects of prescription medication, are associated with their crash risk has not been fully investigated. Aimed to address this knowledge gap, a mail survey of older drivers in Illinois, U.S. was conducted. Information on respondents’ driving behaviors, demographic characteristics, physical conditions, medication use, crash experience, etc. was gathered. Response distributions, odds ratios, and logistic regression models were employed to analyze the survey data. The results showed that most respondents kept a high level of mobility despite driving difficulty and medication use. Older drivers’ crash risk is mainly affected by external factors (driving exposure, alcohol consumption, and medication use) rather than their demographic characteristics and driving difficulty. Warnings from physicians on the side effects of prescription drugs had no significant effects on older drivers’ crash risk. Given the importance of mobility to older adults, the focus needs to be placed on providing a safe roadway system and safe driving advice for older drivers, particularly those who are on medication.
Highlights
Compared to younger groups, the older population aged 65 or above are at higher risk of involvement in motor vehicle crashes due to the deterioration in their physical and health conditions [1,2]
This section presents the analysis results of the survey data. It includes the frequency distributions and rankings of survey responses, odds ratios of selected survey variables, independent explanatory variables determined from the collinearity analysis, and the logistic regression analysis results
8% of older drivers who participated in the survey reported they drove under influence
Summary
The older population aged 65 or above are at higher risk of involvement in motor vehicle crashes due to the deterioration in their physical and health conditions [1,2]. How to mitigate older people’s motor vehicle crashes while keeping their mobility and independence has gained more attention among transportation agencies, researchers, and practitioners. Many studies have been conducted on the safety of older road users, but they mainly focused on the correlation/association of aging-related physical and medical conditions with older people motor vehicle crashes or driving performance. Inadequate surveillance and misjudgment of the gap between vehicles have been identified as the most critical errors made by older drivers (70 years and older) involved in crashes with reference to middle-aged drivers (35–54 years) [8]
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