This study aims to explore the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of recidivist road offenders and to estimate the involvement of these drivers in traffic accidents in Israel. The study asks two main questions: Who are the recidivist drivers and is there a relationship between traffic tickets and involvement in road accidents? Following a literature review, we derived eight research hypotheses, which were tested through a unique database that combines data from the 1995 Israeli census with road-accidents records from 1983-2008 and police traffic ticket records from 2002-2008. The combined database included 409,051 drivers, who received 830,763 tickets (not including parking tickets) and were involved in 22,561 accidents, among them 2,401 fatal and severe accidents, between the years 2002 and 2008. This database enabled a characterization of the demographic and socio-economic attributes of drivers who received traffic tickets and an exploration of the relationship between receiving traffic tickets and involvement in road accidents. (Author/publisher)
Abstract