The effects of road-surface conditions, age, and gender on driver-injury severities

Drivers’ adaptation to weather-induced changes in roadway-surface conditions is a complex process that can potentially be influenced by many factors including age and gender. Using a mixed logit analysis, this research assesses the effects that age, gender, and other factors have on crash severities by considering single-vehicle crashes that occurred on dry, wet, and snow/ice-covered roadway surfaces. With an extensive database of single-vehicle crashes from Indiana in 2007 and 2008, estimation results showed that there were substantial differences across age/gender groups under different roadway-surface conditions. For example, for all females and older males, the likelihood of severe injuries increased when crashes occurred on wet or snow/ice surfaces–but for male drivers under 45 years of age, the probability of severe injuries decreased on wet and snow/ice surfaces – relative to dry-surface crashes. This and many other significant differences among age and gender groups suggest that drivers perceive and react to pavement-surface conditions in very different ways, and this has important safety implications. Furthermore, the empirical findings of this study highlight the value of considering subsets of data to unravel the complex relationships within crash-injury severity analysis.

► Injury severities in single vehicle crashes are studied.
► Differences in injury-severity probabilities are found between men and women.
► Injury-severity probabilities are also found to vary by age and road-surface condition at the time of crash.
► Results show age and gender significantly affect how drivers respond to changing road-surface conditions.