Examining the Environmental, Vehicle, and Driver Factors Associated with Crossing Crashes of Elderly Drivers Using Association Rules Mining

Abstract

In the aging society, reducing vehicle crashes caused by elderly drivers has become a crucial issue. To find effective methods to reduce these vehicle crashes, it is necessary to give some insights into the characteristics of vehicle crashes and those of traffic violations caused by elderly drivers. However, multiple significant factors associated with crossing crashes due to elderly drivers were not extensively observed in previous studies. To fill this research gap, this study identifies the crash pattern and examines the environmental, vehicle, and driver factors associated with crossing crashes due to elderly drivers. The 5-year crash data in Toyota City, Japan, are used for empirical analysis. The emerging data mining method called association rules mining is applied to discover various factors associated with crossing crashes of elderly and nonelderly drivers, respectively. The significant findings indicate that (1) elderly drivers are more likely to lead to crossing or right-turn crashes, compared with nonelderly drivers; (2) there are more factors including crash location (intersection without signal), lighting (daylight), road condition (dry and other), weather condition (clear and raining), vehicle type (light motor truck), and traffic violation (fail to confirm safety) associated with the large proportion of crossing crashes due to elderly drivers. The findings of this study can be used by traffic safety professionals to implement some countermeasures to reduce the crossing crashes due to elderly drivers.