The present study explored contributing factors to traffic accidents involved by occupational truck drivers by analysing 10-year incident records collected from 18 trucking companies in Japan. A total of 1292 drivers' records were collected, each of which specified a driver's individual attributes - including his/her task- and organisation-related factors - and history of incident cases for the recent ten years. As the driver's individual attributes, each record included age, gender, work experience, penalty points on driving license, and scores of an "aptitude test" which comprised five personality/attitude traits and four sensorimotor functions. Examples of task-related variables were vehicle type, vehicle's carrying capacity, driving area and annual working days. From results of the Mann-Whitney test with the recent three-year incident data, it was suggested that truck drivers' emotional stability and safety attitudes contribute to safety performance on the road. As other influential factors, results derived from the Chi-square test revealed lower risk of traffic accidents for drivers having the following characteristics: no penalty point on the driving license, longer occupational experiences, shorter driving distance per year, engaging in short-distance delivery and working in a smaller-sized company. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting