PURPOSES : Low visibility caused by dark surroundings at nighttime affects the likelihood of accidents, and various efforts, such as installing road safety facilities, have been made to reduce accidents at night. Despite these efforts, the nighttime severity index (SI) in Korea was higher than the daytime SI during 2011-2014. This study determined the factors affecting daytime and nighttime accident severity through a discriminant analysis. METHODS: Discriminant analysis. RESULTS: First, drowsiness, lack of attention, and lighting facilities affected both daytime and nighttime accident severity. Accidents were found to be caused by a low ability to recognize the driving conditions and a low obstacle avoidance capability. Second, road conditions and speeding affected only the daytime accident severity. Third, failure to maintain a safe distance significantly affected daytime accident severity and nonsignificantly affected nighttime accident severity. The majority of such accidents were caused by rear-end collisions of vehicles driving in the same direction; given the low relative speed difference in such cases, the shock imparted by the accidents was minimal. CONCLUSIONS: Accidents caused by a failure to maintain a safe distance has lower severity than do accidents caused by other factors.

PURPOSES: The objective of this study is to analyze factors affecting traffic accident severity for determining countermeasures on freeway climbing lanes. METHODS : In this study, an ordered probit model, which is a widely used discrete choice model for categorizing crash severity, was employed. RESULTS: Results suggest that factors affecting traffic accident severity on climbing lanes include speed, drowsy driving, grade of uphill 3%, gender (male offender and male victim), and cloud weather. CONCLUSIONS : Several countermeasures are proposed for improving traffic safety on freeway climbing lanes based on the analysis of crash severity. More extensive analysis with a larger data set and various modeling techniques are required for generalizing the results.

PURPOSES: The purpose of this study is to verify traffic accident injury severity factors for elderly drivers and the relative relationship of these factors. METHODS: To verify the complicated relationship among traffic accident injury severity factors, this study employed a structural equation model (SEM). To develop the SEM structure, only the severity of human injuries was considered; moreover, the observed variables were selected through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The number of fatalities, serious injuries, moderate injuries, and minor injuries were selected for observed variables of severity. For latent variables, the accident situation, environment, and vehicle and driver factors were respectively defined. Seven observed variables were selected among the latent variables. RESULTS: This study showed that the vehicle and driver factor was the most influential factor for accident severity among the latent factors. For the observed variable, the type of vehicle, type of accident, and status of day or night for each latent variable were the most relative observed variables for the accident severity factor. To verify the validity of the SEM, several model fitting methods, including , GFI, AGFI, CFI, and others, were applied, and the model produced meaningful results. CONCLUSIONS: Based on an analysis of results of traffic accident injury severity for elderly drivers, the vehicle and driver factor was the most influential one for injury severity. Therefore, education tailored to elderly drivers is needed to improve driving behavior of elderly driver.