Fatal and serious road crashes involving young drivers in New Zealand: a latent class clustering approach

The over-representation of young drivers in road crashes and injuries is a major ongoing concern world-wide. This study offers a classification analysis of young-drivers’ serious and fatal crashes as a decision-aid for designing youth targeted road safety programs. Latent class analysis was applied to police records of serious and fatal crashes involving 15-24 year-old drivers in New Zealand to provide a comprehensive and multi-dimensional overview of crash patterns. The analysis yielded 15 and 8 latent classes of single- and multi-vehicle crashes and raised three major safety concerns for young drivers: (i) risky road behavior involving reckless driving and traffic law violations; (ii) inattention, error, and hazard perception problems; (iii) interaction with difficult road geometry and lighting conditions, especially on open roads and state highways with a 90 km/h or higher speed limit