Analyzing Road Accidents: Contribution of Driver Behaviors (T-0647) (MFN 8312)

Abstract

Continuous innovations are taking place all around the globe in order to develop solutions for catering the problems encountered by human beings and facilitating them. Prevention from variety of accidents is one important concern of researchers and solution developers including burning, drowning, terrorism, electric shocks and road traffic. Current study aims to analyze contribution of different driver behaviors resulting in road accidents and further to propose a viable solution to bring reduction in frequency of road accidents with the purpose to facilitate the society at large. The study is descriptive in nature using survey method where sample data is collected from 345 drivers from various professions. The questionnaire consists of 53 items measuring six independent variables i.e. slips, errors, mistakes, lapses violations and unintentional violations for measuring their contribution towards accidents and age is taken as a moderator. The statistical techniques used include reliability tests, correlation and normality tests and regression analysis. Each factor was found significant contributor towards road accidents but violation proved to be major one whereas errors proved relatively lesser contributor. Moreover, no significant difference was found in driver behavior of male and female, but age was found to have moderating effect on relationship between driver behaviors and accidents, and rate of accidents decreases with the increase in age and vice versa. Based upon findings, study proposes a reliable and efficient solution for improvement in urban transportation system known as vehicle to infrastructure communication in vehicular ad hoc networks. The vehicle to infrastructure communication is used to inform vehicles about chances of accident. The simulation is developed on vehicular ad hoc network simulator (VANET SIM) and run on 4,963 nodes (virtual vehicles). The results are analyzed from the log files that are generated from simulation and system performance is found unaffected by increase in number of vehicles suggesting remarkable improvement in transportation system. The solution is developed and proposed as a help for traffic management system to reduce road accidents and will develop cooperation and attention in drivers.