title: Fatal and serious road crashes involving young New Zealand drivers: a latent class clustering approach.
abstract: The over-representation of young drivers in road crashes remains an important concern worldwide. Cluster analysis has been applied to young driver sub-groups, but its application by analysing crash occurrence is just emerging. We present a classification analysis that advances the field through a holistic overview of crash patterns useful for designing youth-targeted road safety programmes. We compiled a database of 8644 New Zealand crashes from 2002 to 2011 involving at least one 15-24-year-old driver and a fatal or serious injury for at least one road user. We considered crash location, infrastructure characteristics, environmental conditions, demographic characteristics, driving behaviour, and pre-crash manoeuvres. The analysis yielded 15 and 8 latent classes of, respectively, single-vehicle and multi-vehicle crashes, and average posterior probabilities measured the odds of correct classification that revealed how the identified clusters contain mostly crashes of a particular class and all the crashes of that class. The results raised three major safety concerns for young drivers that should be addressed: (1) reckless driving and traffic law violations; (2) inattention, error, and hazard perception problems; and (3) interaction with road geometry and lighting conditions, especially on high-speed open roads and state highways.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Preventive and Social Medicine , University of Otago , Dunedin , New Zealand.
authors.forename: Harold B
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Weiss
authors.affiliation: b Department of Transport , Technical University of Denmark , Kgs. Lyngby , Denmark.
authors.forename: Sigal
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kaplan
authors.affiliation: b Department of Transport , Technical University of Denmark , Kgs. Lyngby , Denmark.
authors.forename: Carlo Giacomo
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Prato
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000401:mortality* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D000293:Adolescent; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009520:New Zealand / Q000453:epidemiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: clustering analysis; latent class analysis; road crashes; young driver problem