Driving Patterns of Young Drivers within a Graduated Driver Licensing System. Presented at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board

TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal. Young drivers in Israel, as in other parts of the world, are involved in car crashes more than any other age group. In Israel, a graduated driver licensing (GDL) system has been introduced, which requires all new drivers to be accompanied by an experienced driver whenever they drive for the first three months after obtaining a driving license. As part of the efforts to characterize the driving behavior of young drivers in the accompanied driving period and the period immediately thereafter and we conduct a novel experiment, which uses information gathered from an in-vehicle data recorder (IVDR). In the experiment, an IVDR system is installed in the primary vehicles driven by the young drivers in the families that participate in the experiment. The system monitors all trips made by the vehicle and all drivers are identified. We report on results of the analysis of these data. In particular we study the amount of driving young drivers undertake in the accompanied driving period and the period thereafter, and the characteristics of the temporal distributions of these trips. We find striking differences between the driving patterns characteristics in the two periods in all these aspects, and between the IVDR measurements and similar statistics obtained through self reports. TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal