Effects of Traffic Violation and Demographic Characteristics on Traffic Safety in Sulaymaniyah City

Abstract

One of the major causes to increase traffic accidents is traffic violations from drivers that occur on road networks. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of traffic violation and demographic characteristics of the drivers on the traffic safety in Sulaymaniyah urban street networks. A questionnaire survey approach was used to collect data from 244 drivers; 143 male and 101 female drivers. The questionnaire form included ten questions; six of the questions were related to the traffic violations types and four of them were related to the demographic parameters of the drivers. Each of the drivers answer scored on a six-point Likert scale (1 = never, to 6 = almost always). Statistical Minitab 16 software was used to statistically evaluate the data and compare the scores using z-test, then obtain the descriptive statistics. There were significant differences between the violation scores from male and female drivers. It was realized that the male drivers drive their vehicles in more violative manner than female drivers because male drivers had higher scores in all types of the moving vehicle violations and overall violations compared to female drivers. The female drivers had a smaller number of accidents, age, and travelling distance than male drivers. The old age drivers do fewer violations than young drivers. Drivers having high travelling distance per week do more violations than drivers having less driving distance per week. The overall violation score correlates with the age of drivers (rs = 0.247), number of accidents (rs = 0.265). All types of the violation measurements are highly correlated with the overall average value of the violation. However, the overall value of the violation score for all of the drivers was 18.1 out of 100. Efforts should be spent by traffic police to reduce number of traffic accidents and improving efficiency of the traffic flows in Sulaymaniyah City for the street networks. Rather than stopping traffic police on intersections, it is preferred to traffic police observe the drivers’ violation on the streets during driving. Regarding to the driving license, traffic police can concentrate more to male and young drivers.