Driver and vehicle type parameters' contribution to traffic safety in UAE

Abstract

Former traffic safety studies showed clearly that driver or human factor is a major contributor to road accidents. Hence, to better understand the traffic accident nature it's so vital to analyze all characteristics related to drivers involved in these accidents. This article focuses on this aspect through using a dataset representing UAE traffic accidents in the time interval between 2007 and 2010. A major focus was given in this article to analyzing the relation between traffic accidents and driver citizenship for all types of involved vehicles. This was due to the fact that drivers in UAE came from different backgrounds (over than 100 citizenships) and hence it's so important to identify citizenships with major involvement in road accidents for each vehicle type. This will allow traffic authorities to give special attentions to these citizenships and vehicle types through special traffic awareness programs, fining system or other preventive measures aiming to reduce the accidents frequency and severity levels. Results indicated that for all types of vehicles emirates nationals drivers represent the citizenship with the highest involvement rate in traffic accidents (30.02%) followed by Pakistanis (21.26%) then comes the Indians drivers with a percentage of 11.95%. Light vehicle type traffic accidents statistics shows that a general trend can be seen for all citizenships where there is an increase in the number of traffic accidents over the course of the three years. The main contribution of the paper is its uniqueness in analyzing such accidents database after the implementation of the new unified traffic law in UAE.