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Road safety study in New Zealand: Road Crashes involving overseas Drivers

Abstract

The study explores the driving behaviour of overseas drivers and identifies the key causes contributing to road crashes in New Zealand (NZ) related to demographic and socio-economic characteristics of overseas drivers. A revealed preference (RP) study of 205 overseas drivers has been used to investigate whether overseas drivers’ characteristics affected their ranked preference for attributes related to the risk of driving in NZ. The RP study and rank-ordered logistics regression models have been used to identify the importance of various factors in determining the causes of crashes and providing some insights into issues that should be considered accident reduction policy development. The results indicate that roundabouts are rare in some Asian countries and thus confusing to Asian drivers; mountainous roads are considered the most difficult terrain to drive on. The results further indicate that fatigue has a moderate impact on the drivers, with those aged above 30 tending to believe that fatigue affects subsequent driving performance. The results are consistent with the historical data from 2,328 crashes related to overseas drivers from 2010 to 2014 as extracted from the Crash Analysis System. Finally, the results of this study indicate that ‘tailored’ programmes to educate overseas drivers would be more effective than current practices and guidelines

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