Citation

Al-Madani H, Al-Janahi A. Safety Sci. 2006; 44(4): 335-347.

Affiliation

Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Centre for Transport and Road Studies (CTRS), College of Engineering, University of Bahrain, Isa Town, Bahrain (aaljanahi@eng.uob.bh)

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2005.10.009

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Pedestrians are involved in traffic accidents due to many reasons. It is generally thought that personal background of pedestrians has an effect on their involvement rate in the road traffic accidents. Identifying these characteristics would lead to a better understanding of pedestrian accident pattern so that the resources in the field of education, engineering, and enforcement could be used in better ways. This study attempts to test the hypothesis mentioned earlier. The investigated personal background includes the following characteristics: gender, type, age, nationality, and educational background. The data was reduced from vast number of pedestrian injury accident reports in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The actual accident records were categorized according to these characteristics and compared to their exposure risk. It was assumed that the exposure risk, which is the expected number of accidents for each category of the pedestrians, was in proportion to their presence in the pedestrian population. Another study was carried out in parallel to observe the pedestrian characteristics in Bahrain. The results of the two studies were analyzed statistically using Chi-square method to compare the actual to the expected accident frequencies. The whole Kingdom of Bahrain population statistics were used wherever the information on the pedestrian population was not available. The findings revealed that personal characteristics considered in this study have significant influence on pedestrian's involvement in traffic accidents. The results also showed that pedestrians with the following characteristics were probably showing risk to exposure to accidents more than other categories: male, young (0-12 years) and old (50 years and over), non-local, and those with low educational background.