Aberrant behaviors of drivers involved in crashes and related injury severity: Are there variations between the major cities in the same country?

• Published in: Journal of safety research 2024-06, Vol.89, p.64-82
• Main Authors: Intini, Paolo, Berloco, Nicola, Coropulis, Stefano, Fonzone, Achille, Ranieri, Vittorio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aberrant behavior; Accidents, Traffic - statistics & numerical data; Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Automobile Driving - statistics & numerical data; Cities - epidemiology; Crash circumstances; Female; Human factors; Humans; Italy - epidemiology; Logistic Models; Male; Middle Aged; Multilevel approach; Pedestrians - statistics & numerical data; Urban crashes; Wounds and Injuries - epidemiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0022-4375; 1879-1247
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jsr.2024.01.010

•Crash-related driver aberrant behaviours were explored based on an urban crash dataset.•Several relationships between other crash factors and driver aberrant behaviours were found.•A variability between different cities in the same country was found only for inattention crashes.•Crash factors affect the injury severity level of vehicle occupants and involved pedestrians. Introduction: Crash data analyses based on accident datasets often do not include human-related variables because they can be hard to reconstruct from crash data. However, records of crash circumstances can help for this purpose since crashes can be classified considering aberrant behavior and misconduct of the drivers involved. Method: In this case, urban crash data from the 10 largest Italian cities were used to develop four logistic regression models having the driver-related crash circumstance (aberrant behaviors: inattentive driving, illegal maneuvering, wrong interaction with pedestrian and speeding) as dependent variables and the other crash-related factors as predictors (information about the users and the vehicles involved and about road geometry and conditions). Two other models were built to study the influence of the same factors on the injury severity of the occupants of vehicles for which crash circumstances related to driver aberrant behaviors were observed and of the involved pedestrians. The variability between the 10 different cities was considered through a multilevel approach, which revealed a significant variability only for the inattention-related crash circumstance. In the other models, the variability between cities was not significant, indicating quite homogeneous results within the same country. Results: The results show several relationships between crash factors (driver, vehicle or road-related) and human-related crash circumstances and severity. Unsignalized intersections were particularly related to the illegal maneuvering crash circumstance, while the night period was clearly related to the speeding-related crash circumstance and to injuries/casualties of vehicle occupants. Cyclists and motorcyclists were shown to suffer more injuries/casualties than car occupants, while the latter were generally those exhibiting more aberrant behaviors. Pedestrian casualties were associated with arterial roads, heavy vehicles, and older pedestrians.