Assisting the older driver - SWOV

Current state of the art: crashes and injuries
By examining the causes of these crashes, and by removing these causes by
taking specific measures, the crash involvement of older drivers may be
reduced. By doing so, the fatality rate of older drivers will also come closer to
that of the ʹaverageʹ driver. Crash statistics show that older drivers are more
often responsible for crashes at intersections. The causes of these crashes are
relatively often not yielding, fatigue or illness, and unsafe joining or exiting
in through‐traffic. To be able to prevent these crashes from happening, it is
important to know which factors lead to the involvement of older drivers in
these types of crashes. Possible sources of causal factors are the general
characteristics of older drivers, the characteristics of intersections and the
compatibility of these two sets of characteristics. These three sources form
the main topics of the rest of this thesis. The next chapter deals with the first
causal factor: the general characteristics of the older driver.
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