Assisting the older driver - SWOV

Assisting the older driver
Another crash cause that is mentioned in the literature, ignoring traffic signs
and lights (e.g., Maycock, 1997; McGwin & Brown, 1999), is according to data
from the Netherlands not a crash cause that is over‐represented in crashes of
older drivers. This may have to do with different regulations for the
placement of signs and traffic lights.
1.4. Threat to other road users or not
Having established that older drivers are relatively often legally responsible
for the crashes they are involved in (see Section 1.2.3), the question presents
itself of whether older drivers are a threat to others. To answer this question,
a comparison was made of the number of older drivers that were the crash
opponent of a road user that got injured and the number of older road users
that got injured as a result of a collision with a(nother) car. It turned out that
older drivers are about twice as often injured as they cause injuries to others.
For younger people, the ratio is closer to one as far as it concerns injuries to
other drivers (see Figure 1.6; ratios below one in this figure indicate that
people of that age group are more often being hurt than they themselves hurt
other road users). As regards injuries to other types of road users (including
car passengers), the ratios for younger drivers indicate that they more often
cause injuries than that they get injured themselves.
2,5
2
Ratio
1,5
1
0,5
driver‐driver
driver‐other
0
18‐24 25‐29 30‐39 40‐49 50‐59 60‐64 65‐74 75+
Figure 1.6. Ratio of being the driver versus being injured for crashes between
cars and collisions between cars and other road users respectively. Number of
drivers involved in crashes divided by the number of hospitalised or killed
drivers or other road users in that same age group (1996‐1998). Source:
Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management.
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