Pattern Classification of Taxi Drivers Based on Work and Living Conditions for Commercial Vehicle Safety Management System

The in-depth crash causes analysis for commercial vehicles is necessary to develop more effective safety countermeasures because the crash severity due to commercial vehicles is much higher than other vehicle types. A viable countermeasure to cope with commercial vehicle crashes is to conduct a traffic safety consulting for commercial vehicle drivers. The purpose of this study is to classify the pattern of taxi drivers, which is a fundamental to developing a customized consulting program. A two-stage clustering methodology is adopted to recognize the pattern of taxi drivers based on driver’s intrinsic characteristics underlying the cause of the crash occurrence that include working, health, and living conditions. Results show that it is desirable to classify taxi drivers into four groups such as ‘overworking’, ‘life-imbalanced’, ‘work and life-balanced’, and ‘unspecified-normal’. Discussions on how to use four driver patterns in conducting the safety consulting are presented. In addition, an example of consulting method is presented, which is expected to be used for developing effective consulting programs.