Relationships between risk of causing a motorway crash in Austria and attributes of drivers

Objective The emphasis of the study presented in this paper was to identify the attributes of drivers who are prone to cause a motorway crash. It was induced byambitions to enhance the effectiveness of traffic safety campaigns by identifying subgroups of drivers more precisely. Method For this purpose we conducted an accident data analysis of all injury crashes 2012–2014 on Austrian motorways. Since 2012 it is possible for the police to label the “mainly responsible person” for the crash in the Austrian electronic accident recording system. It turned out that the quality of the data had some limitations, which required considerable pre-processing. The analysis by comparing the proportions of “mainly responsible” and “not responsible” drivers was done using descriptive statistics and logistic regression models. The binary characteristic, if a person was, according to the police, mainly responsible for the crash served as response variable. It was regressed on various personal and vehicle characteristics in order to identify their influence on the probability of causing a crash. Results/Conclusions The results yield apparent tendencies, some of which support well-known pattern, e.g., the disproportionally high risk of motorcyclists and - to a lesser extent - young and elderly car drivers to cause an accident. Other results were less expected, e.g., the higher risk of foreign car drivers (compared to Austrian drivers) as well as drivers of light trucks, whereas drivers of heavy trucks revealed a below-average risk of causing a crash. The differences between male and female car drivers were small from young to middle age and fully disappeared in the high age group. There is some evidence that the frequency and experience of driving on a motorway have more influence on the risk of causing a crash than the driver’s gender. From this we conclude that motorway safety campaigns should on the one hand focus on the abovementioned groups of high risk drivers and on the other hand, in terms of car drivers, equally address both male and female drivers.