Drinking, texting, ageing, or youth: which attribute is the riskiest for driving?

ABSTRACT

Assessing the risk factors causing car accidents is a crucial first step in adopting appropriate public policies to achieve road safety. We measure the risk of four distinctive driver attributes, drinking, texting, ageing, and youth, using the Levitt and Porter, 2001 framework. We find that while drink-driving is the riskiest of the four attributes (2.9 times more dangerous than sober driving), drivers aged 70 years or older are similarly risky (2.75 times more dangerous than younger drivers). These results suggest that appropriate public policies, such as a strict driver’s licence system, stringent fines on drink-driving, regulations such as average speed limits, and subsidies for advanced safety vehicles, may reduce car crashes.

KEYWORDS:

• Car accidents
• drink-driving
• texting
• ageing

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• R41
• R48

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kenmei Tsubota and seminar participants at Hosei University and the Japan Society for International Economics Annual Meeting for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own. Financial support for this research was provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Nos. 17H04550, 18K01624).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In Japan, the number of licence holders aged over 74 years was 5.4 million in 2017.

² For estimation issues in the Levitt and Porter (2001) model, see Dunn and Tefft, (2020).

³ www.itarda.or.jp/english

⁴ The definition of a serious injury is one that requires one month or more of treatment.

⁵ www.npa.go.jp/publications/statistics/koutsuu/index-jiko-e.html

⁶ In 2014, the total number of driver’s licence holders was 82,076,223 and the number of licence holders aged at least 70 years was 9,320,223 (Driver’s Licence Statistics by the National Police Agency).

⁷ New drivers in Japan must have at least 60 hours of driving lessons (26 hours of classroom lectures and 34 hours of in-car driving lessons).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS [17H04550, 18K01624].