Road Safety Analysis (RSA), a not-for-profit company which specialises in analysis, insight reporting, social marketing communications and partnership development, was approached to explore the issue of young drivers and their crash risk. Young and inexperienced drivers are over-represented within collision statistics globally and are often the focus of road safety interventions. It was hypothesised that young drivers who live in rural areas are more at risk of collision-involvement than their urban cousins. This hypothesis was based on studies which have identified common factors within young driver collisions; many of these factors centre on rural driving. RSA was ideally placed to explore this hypothesis — as creators of MAST, an online analysis tool for road safety professionals which combines Department for Transport collision data with socio-demographic profiling; the organisation had the expertise and tools to carry out the analysis. Rurality classifications systems have been developed by the Government which defines the rurality of small area geographies (known as Lower Layer Super Output Areas in England and Wales and Data Zones in Scotland and have average populations of 1,400 people). Each of these small areas was defined as either ‘Rural’, ‘Town’ (which is a sub-class of ‘Rural’) or ‘Urban’ (which are settlements with over 10,000 residents). Postcode data from young drivers who had been involved in injury collisions in Great Britain from 2006 to 2010 were used to determine the number of drivers from each rural, urban and town small areas of the country. For the purposes of the analysis, young drivers were classified as 16 to 29 years as this is the age range for which population data is provided at the small area level. Numbers of drivers per area were compared to population figures to determine collision rates for each class of rurality. (Author/publisher)
Abstract