 "Photo: Mary Kang/ The Daily Texan")
Analysis by UT researchers of more than 2,300 vehicle crashes on U.S. roadways suggests that drivers between the ages of 16 and 20 are more likely to drive aggressively.
From January through September, civil engineering professor Chandra Bhat and civil engineering graduate students Rajesh Paleti and Naveen Eluru analyzed data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The crashes analyzed occurred between January 2005 and December 2007 and involved a collision of some kind, either between two cars or a car and a stationary object.
“We processed this data and used it to answer the questions: who participates in aggressive acts and how is injury severity influenced because of participation in aggressive acts,” Paleti said.
Aggressive driving behavior includes speeding, tailgating, frequent lane changing, cutting others off, obscene gestures and ignoring traffic control devices, Bhat said.
The probability of a man driving aggressively is about 55 percent higher than the probability of a woman driving aggressively, according to the analysis.
Those in the age group of 21 to 65 years are about twice as likely to drive aggressively than those over age 65, whereas individuals ages 18 to 20 are about three times more likely and those ages 16 to 17 are more than four times as likely to do so.
The results indicate that drivers who do not wear seat belts or who drive pick-up trucks and SUVs are more likely to drive aggressively.
Aggression aside, Bhat said younger drivers generally sustain less severe injuries than drivers older than 65 because of their better health and flexibility.
“The older you get, the less aggressive you get,” he said. “But the older you get, [without considering aggression] the more likely you are to get severe injuries from accidents.”
When young drivers have young passengers, regardless of how many, the drivers tend to exhibit more aggressive driving behaviors, often to show off, Bhat said. But traveling with a single young passenger poses the greatest risk of high crash-related injury severity for 16- and 17-year-old drivers, the data suggests.
“Our hypothesis is that if you have just one young passenger, there’s a lot of distraction,” Bhat said. “With this distraction you might not see a crash developing, and you may not be able to take evasive maneuvers to reduce the effect of the crash. If you have two young passengers, the distraction level goes down possibly because the two are keeping each other occupied.”
