The monetary injury risk value of a crashed vehicle: a gender driving analysis

The bodily injury severity of a vehicle involved in a crash has traditionally been defined in literature as the one associated with the most serious injured occupant and, therefore, excluding from the analysis the injured victims other than the most serious one. In this study, we propose an aggregate injury severity indicator for a crashed vehicle, based on the alternative metrics used in road safety research to calculate the monetary value of the change in risk of death and injury for each person in the vehicle. The main advantage of our indicator is that, by projecting the different qualitative levels of injury severity into monetary values, it allows aggregating the injury severity levels sustained by all occupants of a vehicle into a single value. We analyse the effect of the gender of the driver and its interaction with other risk factors on the expected monetary value of the injury risk of the vehicle. We found evidence of gender differences in driving, consistent with ‘couple driving behaviour’, where a man is more likely to be the driver when a woman (presumably the couple) is also in the vehicle. When the driver was a woman, the expected monetary value of the injury risk was on average reduced by 22 % for the occupants of the vehicle, and by 34 % for the passengers, i.e. excluding the driver's injuries. The reduction of the monetary value of the injury risk of passengers was higher for young female drivers than for old ones, with young-older female drivers (aged 66–74 years) being riskier for occupants than the young-older male drivers. In conclusion, analysing the gender differences in the aggregate expected injury severity for all occupants of the vehicle provides road safety policy makers with a better approximation of the injury severity resulting from motor vehicle crashes.