Citation

Yasmin S, Pinjari AR, Eluru N. Procedia Soc. Behav. Sci. 2013; 104: 1020-1029.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.11.197

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Given the import of the consequences of motor vehicle crashes, transportation safety researchers examined the influence of exogenous variables on vehicle occupant injury severity. Our study focuses on identifying the associated risk factors of driver fatalities while recognizing that fatality is not a single state but rather is made up of multiple discrete states from dying instantly to dying within the thirty days of crash by using the data from Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The research also simultaneously examines the whole spectrum of injury severity on an eleven point ordinal severity scale - no injury to fatality characterized as instant death by using a pooled dataset from FARS and General Estimates System (GES) dataset. The data pooling exercise is done to replace the "less informative" fatal crashes in the GES databases with the more detailed fatal crashes from FARS database. The data for the current study is sourced from the FARS and GES databases for the year 2010. The generalized ordered logit approach is considered for the empirical analyses. The important control variables that affect the both the early fatality risk and the injury severity outcome of the drivers include: driving under the influence of alcohol, medium or higher speed limits and increase in vehicle age.