Examining the relationship between impaired driving and past crash involvement in Europe: Insights from the ESRA study

Abstract

Driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs and fatigue are all important factors of crash causation. Exploring the link between driver attitudes and crash involvement provides understanding on these important issues. To that end, questionnaire answers of car drivers disclosing their attitudes on the impacts of driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs and fatigue, and their relationship with past crash involvement as car drivers were analysed. A two-step approach is adopted: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to consolidate relative questions in numeric factor quantities. Afterwards, binary logistic regression was implemented on the calculated component scores to determine the impact of perspectives of road users for each factor on past crash involvement of car drivers. Data from the international ESRA2015 survey were utilized. PCA indicated that it is possible to meaningfully merge 29 ESRA2015 questions relevant to driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs and fatigue into 8 informative components accounting for an adequate percentage of variance. Binary logistic analysis indicated that components involving overall personal and communal acceptance of impaired driving, overall and past year personal behaviour towards impaired driving and frequency of typical journey checks by traffic police were all quantities positively correlated with past crash involvement.

Keywords:

• Driver attitude
• self-reported driving behaviour
• alcohol
• drugs
• fatigue
• crash involvement

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out within the ESRA project (European Survey of Road users’ safety Attitudes), a joint initiative of research organisations and road safety institutes in 17 European countries. The project was funded by the partners’ own resources and coordinated by the Belgian Road Safety Institute (currently VIAS Institute). The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing fruitful input.

Disclosure statement

All the authors declare that there is no conflict of interest for this research.

Additional information

Funding

The authors did not receive any specific grant or other funding for this research.