01656597

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Although the taxi industry is playing an important role in Chinese everyday life, little attention has been posed towards occupational health issues concerning the taxi drivers’ working conditions, driving behavior and road safety. This study administered a cross-sectional survey to 1021 taxi drivers from 21 companies in four Chinese cities and collected information about (i) sociodemographic characteristics, (ii) working conditions, (iii) frequency of daily aberrant driving behavior, and (iv) involvement in property-damage-only (PDO) and personal injury (PI) crashes over the past two years. A hybrid bivariate model of crash involvement was specified: (i) the hybrid part concerned a latent variable model capturing unobserved traits of the taxi drivers; (ii) the bivariate part modelled jointly both types of crashes while capturing unobserved correlation between error terms. The survey answers paint a gloomy picture in terms of workload, as taxi drivers reported averages of 9.4 working hours per day and 6.7 working days per week that amount on average to about 63.0 working hours per week. Moreover, the estimates of the hybrid bivariate model reveal that increasing levels of fatigue, reckless behavior and aggressive behavior are positively related to a higher propensity of crash involvement. Lastly, the heavy workload is also positively correlated with the higher propensity of crashing, not only directly as a predictor of crash involvement, but also indirectly as a covariate of fatigue and aberrant driving behavior. The findings from this study provide insights into potential strategies for preventive education and taxi industry management to improve the working conditions and hence reduce the road risk for the taxi drivers.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE90 Standing Committee on Transportation in the Developing Countries.

18-01095

English

16p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Maps; References (27) ; Tables

Behavior; Driving; Highway safety; Hours of labor; Occupational safety; Taxicab drivers

China

Highways; Passenger Transportation; Safety and Human Factors

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-01095

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 10:16AM