Effect of Drivers Education on Traffic Safety
Much of the research on the relationship between young driver training and crash risks has been correlational. What remains unclear is whether driver training has a direct positive impact on reducing crashes among teen drivers. Answering this question will allow planners and policymakers who aspire to enhance teen driving safety to better understand the effectiveness of driver training on safe driving. In the proposed study, the research team predicts post-licensure traffic crashes among young drivers under 19 years old in Ohio based on whether they received formal driver training before obtaining a driver’s license. The analysis is part of a larger research initiative to study teen driver safety, in collaboration with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the State of Ohio. Data came from a licensing record database maintained by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV). The database contains detailed driver demographics, including date of birth, sex, and home address, as well as information on each driver’s interactions with the BMV, including licensing transaction dates and a driver training completion date. In accordance with data privacy agreements between Ohio and CHOP, a data operations team at CHOP will prepare a de-identified dataset that links young driver’s training records and demographics with their crash records and socioeconomic status variables that are associated with their home Census tracts such as median household income. This study is exempt from institutional review board oversight by CHOP owing to use of de-identified data. Young drivers’ crash risks and whether they choose to take driver training are likely both affected by their safety awareness. Due to the difficulties in measuring safety awareness of young drivers, conventional statistical models such as logistic regression are unable to capture the effect of safety awareness. This shortcoming, known as endogeneity, will lead to inaccurate estimates of the relationship between young driver crash risks and their driver training status. To overcome this issue, the team proposes a two-stage logistic regression modeling framework. In the first stage, the team predicts young drivers’ likelihood of taking driver training using the travel time to the nearest driving school from the drivers’ home Census tracts and the median household income of their home Census tracts. Previous studies from the research team have found that both travel time and home Census tract’s median household income are significant contributors to teens’ likelihood of taking driver training (Dong, Wu, Jensen, et al., 2023; Dong, Wu, Walshe, et al., 2023). In the second stage, the team uses the young driver’s predicted probabilities of taking driver training from the first stage to estimate whether they have been involved in traffic crashes post-licensure. The team hypothesizes that young drivers who took driver training have lower crash risks than those who delayed licensure until 18 years old and forwent driver training.
- Record URL:
Language
- English
Project
- Status: Active
- Funding: $159603
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Contract Numbers:
69A3552344811
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Sponsor Organizations:
Safety21 University Transportation Center
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA United States 15213Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
University Transportation Centers Program
Department of Transportation
Washington, DC United States 20590University Transportation Center Program
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC United States 20590 -
Project Managers:
Stearns, Amy
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Performing Organizations:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Philadelphia, PA United States 19104-6315 -
Principal Investigators:
Guerra, Erick
- Start Date: 20240701
- Expected Completion Date: 20250630
- Actual Completion Date: 0
- USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Crash rates; Demographics; Driver training; Socioeconomic factors; Teenage drivers
- Geographic Terms: Ohio
- Subject Areas: Education and Training; Highways; Safety and Human Factors;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01932658
- Record Type: Research project
- Source Agency: Safety21 University Transportation Center
- Contract Numbers: 69A3552344811
- Files: UTC, RIP
- Created Date: Oct 3 2024 3:39PM