The relation between traffic offences and road crashes; Preliminary study making use of Central Fine Collection Agency (CJIB) data. In The Netherlands, no research has been done as yet into the relation between the number of registered traffic offences and the involvement in registered road crashes. Such research could provide answers to the questions whether committing more offences goes hand in hand with disproportionately more and more serious crashes, and to which degree the types of offences or the road user characteristics play a role. These questions are important for the policy field that structures and designs road safety and enforcement policy in The Netherlands: the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment (IenM) and the Ministry of Security and Justice, the police and road safety organizations. This subject is also connected to discussions as regards the importance for road safety of intentional offences versus unintentional errors on the one hand, and the relation between the number and severity of offences and road safety on the other. The present study is a first step in finding out whether Dutch data is sufficiently reliable for further investigation of the relation between offences and crashes. Within the limitations of the present data and method, the study gives preliminary answers to the following three questions: 1. From a technical viewpoint, is it possible to study the relation between offences and crashes by linking the data files of offences and crashes? 2. Is a higher number of crashes related to a disproportionally higher crash involvement? 3. In addition to the previous question: how large will a yet to be defined group of multiple offenders be, with a higher than average endangerment? To answer these questions SWOV analysed two data files that were made available by the Central Fine Collection Agency (CJIB): 1. a file containing the offences committed with vehicles that had been involved in crashes in the year 2009 (combination of a file made available by the Centre for Transport and Navigation and a CJIB file); 2. a CJIB data file containing an arbitrary selection of vehicles that had committed at least one offence in 2009. In both the above files the number of offences per vehicle was considered for the period 2005-2009. By comparing the distribution of the vehicles across the number of violations in each of the files, the relation between crash involvement and the number of violations was studied.
Abstract