How to identify the key factors that affect driver perception of accident risk. A comparison between Italian and Spanish driver behavior

Road crashes can be caused by different factors, including infrastructure, vehicles, and human variables.Many research studies have focused solely on identifying the key factors that cause road crashes. Fromthese studies, it emerged that human factors have the most relevant impact on accident severity. Morespecifically, accident severity depends on several factors related directly to the driver, i.e., drivingexperience, driver's socio-economic characteristics, and driving behavior and attitudes. In this paper, weinvestigate driver behaviors and attitudes while driving and specifically focus on different methods foridentifying the factors that most affect the driver's perception of accident risk. To this end, we designedand conducted a survey in two different European contexts: the city of Cosenza, which is located in thesouth of Italy, and the city of Granada, which is located in the south of Spain. Samples of drivers werecontacted for their opinions on certain aspects of driving rules and attitudes while driving, and differenttypes of questions were addressed to the drivers to assess their judgments of these aspects.Consequently, different methods of data analysis were applied to determine the aspects that heavilyinfluence driver perception of accident risk. An experiment based on the stated preferences (SP) wascarried out with the drivers, and the SP data were analyzed using an ordered probit (OP) model.Interestingfindings emerged from different analyses of the data and from the comparisons among thedata collected in the two different territorial contexts. We found that both Italian and Spanish driversconsider driving in an altered psychophysical state and violating the overtaking rules to be the most riskybehaviors