Regresar

The distracted behaviors of the unlicensed drivers: Effects of the zone and vehicle type.

Abstract:

Nowadays, Traffic Accidents (TA) have been considered a severe public health issue. In spite of the wide range of penalties to reduce the Unsafe Behaviors (UB), i.e. Unlicensed Driving (UD) and Distracted Driving (DD), many converging transportation studies related the degraded driving performance and increased TA and fatalities to the UB. When investigating the TA, these studies have examined effects of numerous parameters, however little attention has been paid to the driving license status of distracted drivers. This paper outlines a contribution to the existing knowledge and investigates the driving license status of the distracted drivers (technology-based distractions) involved in accidents using the Bayesian Network with a particular focus on the influence of the zone and the vehicle type. The dataset for this study has been prepared from a 3-year period database (2016-2018) of accidents in Spain provided by the Spanish Transportation General Department. Results showed that the zone and the vehicle type seem to increase significantly the probability of being unlicensed when engaging in distracted behaviors. Indeed, the probability of being unlicensed when driving motor vehicle and having DD increases from 6.11% to 9.46% on the road and to 42.93% on highways. However, in the case of motorcycles, the probability of being unlicensed when presenting DD increases from 6.11% to 16.89% on the street, 27.42% on the road and to 73.11% on the highway.