Comparison of injury severity level involving drivers with and without commercial driver’s licence involved in small vehicle crashes

Abstract

As vehicle operators, some drivers may have significant impacts on crash-injury severity, and it may be of interest to understand the underlying mechanism of how driver characteristics affect the crash-injury severity. Therefore, this study explored the effect of driver characteristics on crash-injury severity, specifically focusing on drivers with and without commercial driver’s licences (CDL) when driving small vehicles (passenger car, SUV, and pickup truck) with consideration of drivers’ heterogeneity. Crash data from Maryland between January 2015 and December 2018 were analysed, considering factors such as roadway, driver, vehicle, environmental, crash, and temporal characteristics. Furthermore, the random parameters multinomial logit model was adopted to analyse how significant factors affect the crash-injury severity of drivers with and without CDLs. The study identified common features in injury severity among these two types of drivers, as well as notable differences based on their licence types. These findings may provide valuable insights for developing effective long-term strategies to reduce crash.

Keywords:

• Traffic safety
• crash-injury severity
• random parameters multinomial logit model
• unobserved heterogeneity

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was sponsored by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (2021JJ40746) and Postgraduate Research and Innovation Project of Central South University (No. 2023ZZTS0343).