Probing into Driver Speeding Patterns and Their Influence on Child Occupancy in Urban Areas

Abstract

Many studies have investigated how child occupants lead to distraction-associated crashes. However, not many studies have focused on how the presence of child passengers influences drivers’ speeding behavior. This study examines how the presence of child passengers can affect driving behavior considering sociodemographic characteristics such as driver’s age, gender, ethnicity, employment, and driving aggressiveness. The current study used resourceful, open-source data based on urban areas in Texas to identify the key patterns of speeding behavior and associated safety surrogates in the presence or absence of child occupants. A unique data analysis procedure known as Taxicab Correspondence Analysis (TCA) was used to analyze the data. The results indicate that speeding patterns are affected by child occupancy during a trip. The results find that regardless of the presence of child passengers, female and unemployed drivers are more likely to drive defensively and male and employed drivers are more likely to drive aggressively. The findings also indicate that drivers from the young age group (20–29 years old) are strongly associated with speeding trips without child occupancy. However, young parent drivers from this age group are strongly associated with non-speeding trips and driving defensively. The study also finds that the impact of child occupancy on driving behaviors varies across different ethnicities. These findings will benefit transportation agencies in identifying aggressive driver groups and developing countermeasures to mitigate speeding behaviors, especially for trips with child occupancy.