Road safety of elderly pedestrians in the urban context: an approach based on infrastructure and socioeconomic variables

Abstract

The world generalized phenomenon of population ageing, caused by an increase in life expectancy, has led to a more elderly being actively part of mobility and road traffic. In developed countries, like Spain, fatalities and severe injuries among elderly pedestrians in the urban context are a matter of concern since, in the last decades, the fatal accident risk for elderly pedestrians is rising. Although there is an extensive literature on the decline of driving and pedestrian skills in the elderly, few research has been devoted to the impact of the street type and socioeconomic factors per urban district on this type of collisions. The road safety analysis of pedestrians´ collisions is complex due to the diversity of the features, the dispersion of the data and the lack of infrastructure information associated to the accident location at official databases. The main target of this paper is the identification of the basic socioeconomic and infrastructure factors that contribute to elder pedestrian accident at urban level, taking the administrative units (districts) as territorial accident location. Madrid is the capital of one of the most rapidly ageing nations in the world, and was selected as case study because it also has a high proportion of elderly residents (19%). The Spanish General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) provided for this study the database (2006-2018) on accident statistics. The crashes involving an elderly person in Madrid were filtered to elaborate an ad-hoc data base. The study methodology was based on a negative binomial model to test the accident occurrence at district level. Results revealed the clear influence of the district population variables (density and total inhabitants) together with the activity centres associated to the elderly mobility, followed by the ageing rate and the road length per district.