Traffic Safety of Elderly Road User: The Global Trend and the Japanese Case

Abstract

Along with population aging phenomenon, the problems of traffic safety of elderly people is increasingly worsening. Unsurprisingly, numerous studies on this issue have been carried out. However, a meta-review to find out global trends of this has not been observed. The goal of this study is to depict an overall picture of the literature based on a meta revision of well over one hundred related studies, in which the most common findings as well as shortcoming issues are identified. A further effort is made to validate those findings in the case of Japan. The results show that aged people are at a remarkably high risk of traffic accidents largely due to their higher frequency of failures, especially among non-automobile travelers. Their failures could be often resulted from the neurological and physical impairments because of the aging effects. Analyses made on statistical data of Japan showed that Japanese older drivers were not in the same situation as their counterparts in other nations, that is they did not have a higher frequency of failures compared to their young counterparts. Interestingly, improper steering and/or braking was the most common cause of failures which result in traffic accident among the elderly, compared to careless driving of all other age groups. From these findings, suggestions for future research to improve traffic safety situation of the elderly in general, and in particular Japanese context are proposed.

A Study on Method of Extracting High-Risk Accident Causes in Nagano Using Bayesian Network Analysis

“…Based on Table 4 the highest rank for head-on collision causal chains involving senior elderly is at rank 22 with 30.0% severity rate. In this case, the head-on accident might be severe when the second party involved was a senior elderly as they tend to be more vulnerable mentally and physically, there are many signs of declining health for elderly such as vision loss, poor cognitive performance, longer response time and low physical performance such as rapid movement and declining driving ability (14) which made it even more high-risk for them to be involved in head-on collision accidents.…”