Determining older driver crash responsibility from police and insurance data

This study aimed to determine the extent to which older drivers can be considered responsible for their crashes, to identify key factors in those crashes for which older drivers have been judged responsible, and to assess the extent to which older drivers' extra crash responsibility contributes to the road toll. Insurance claims from the State of Tasmania, Australia, for 1998-2002 were linked with police records for crashes involving drivers aged either 41-55 years or 65 years or older. Insurance and police data sets contained independent judgments of crash responsibility. There was a high level of agreement between the two sets of judgments, with older drivers judged around 1.5 times more likely to be responsible for their crashes than middle-aged drivers and, conversely, older drivers were around 0.6 as likely to be absolved from crash responsibility. It was concluded that older drivers' additional crash responsibility while valuable in explaining "what went wrong," currently makes only a small contribution to the overall road toll.