IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v15y2023i2p1631-d1035608.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Elderly Pedestrians and Road Safety: Findings from the Slovenian Accident Database and Measures for Improving Their Safety

Author

Listed:
  • Stanko Laković

    (Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor, Smetanova ulica 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia)

  • Tomaž Tollazzi

    (Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor, Smetanova ulica 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia)

  • Chiara Gruden

    (Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor, Smetanova ulica 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia)

Abstract

The number of elderly people is increasing worldwide, especially in Europe. Such an aging of the population has numerous consequences for society, many of which relate to transportation: older people, aware of their reduced abilities, prefer walking to driving. This leads to an increase in the elderly walking population and thus the need to understand and address the safety issues of these road users. Although these issues are well known, this topic has been little researched so far. The objective of this research is to provide a deeper insight into the safety level of elderly pedestrians by recognizing repetitive patterns leading to accidents involving them, to highlight the magnitude of the problem by analyzing a 10-year pedestrian crash database, to develop a model predicting—on the basis of the recognized patterns—the severity level of collisions involving older pedestrians, and, finally, on the basis of the highlighted factors, to propose some countermeasures to improve their safety. In order to achieve this goal, first, a statistical analysis of the database is performed, considering 13 factors that lead to accidents. Second, Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Anderson–Darling tests are performed to check if the data follow a normal distribution. Finally, an ordinal logistic regression model is proposed to determine the relationship between the crash severity level and the factors characterizing collisions. Thanks to this model, the statistical influencing factors are highlighted. Finally, based on the previous analysis, some technical and educational countermeasures are proposed.

Suggested Citation

  • Stanko Laković & Tomaž Tollazzi & Chiara Gruden, 2023. "Elderly Pedestrians and Road Safety: Findings from the Slovenian Accident Database and Measures for Improving Their Safety," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(2), pages 1-18, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:2:p:1631-:d:1035608
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/2/1631/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/2/1631/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dharmambigai Prithviraj & Lakshmi Sundaram, 2023. "Exploring the Walkability of Senior Citizens in a Densely Populated Neighborhood of Chennai, India—A Structural Equation Modeling Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(18), pages 1-17, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:2:p:1631-:d:1035608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.