The relation of non-culpable traffic incidents to bus drivers' celeration behavior.

PROBLEM: The driver celeration behavior theory predicts that celerations are associated with incidents for which the driver has some responsibility in causing, but not other incidents.

METHOD: The hypothesis was tested in 25 samples of repeated measurements of bus drivers' celeration behavior against their incidents for two years.

RESULTS

The results confirmed the prediction; in 18 samples, the correlation for culpable incidents only was higher than for all incidents, despite the higher means of the latter. Non-culpable incidents had correlations close to zero with celeration.

DISCUSSION: It was pointed out that most individual crash prediction studies have not made this differentiation, and thus probably yielded underestimates of the associations sought, although the effect is not strong, due to non-culpable accident involvements being few (less than a third of the total). The methods for correct identification of culpable incident involvements were discussed.