Crash Rates & Risks: The Role of Vehicle Design (& Type), Driver Habits, & Demographics

Kara PhD Kockelman

Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Traffic fatalities are responsible for 1.3 million deaths annually, worldwide, & 16 percent of all Americans dying between the ages of 1 & 44 (WHO 2010, Xu et al. 2010). Crash rates & consequences can be examined from multiple perspectives, reflecting characteristics of the drivers & passengers, their vehicles, home locations, & crash settings. This presentation focuses on crash risks & injury severities as a function of driver & vehicle characteristics & other factors. For example, heteroscedastic ordered probit models distinguish the effects of vehicle weight, footprint & height on the severity of injuries sustained by vehicle occupants in the U.S. General Estimates Systems data sets (while controlling for many additional attributes). A survey of over 1,000 Americans was employed to analyze the impact of driving habits & distances, citation histories, vehicle ownership, & demographics on crash histories & risk. Lastly, data on the 240 respondents who currently ride or have ridden a motorcycle allow one to analyze the relationship between rider training & riding frequency on regular helmet use, & set the stage for a holistic cost-benefit analysis of motorcycling, to examine tradeoffs in safety, emissions, fuel use, & vehicle costs.

Keywords: Engineering; traffic crashes; motorcycle safety; vehicle design; cost-benefit analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11-22
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2d40r5q9.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt2d40r5q9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().