Section 3 Relationship between Accidents and Traffic Offences
  Section 2 described how traffic violations reflect drivers' characters, and how offences can be categorized into a fewer number of variables/components. How, then, are accidents related to traffic offences?
  For Fig. 6, we first calculated character traits of drivers, based on the relationship of the four principal components to the 12 traffic offences analyzed in Section 2. Drivers were then classified into "low", "medium", and "high" for each principal component score. The figure shows the distribution of drivers according to the type of accidents they caused during the seven-year period from 2000 to 2006.
Drivers who have no record of traffic offences are classified as "low" in repetitiveness, and "medium" in other character traits.
  The charts indicate that drivers scoring high in repetitiveness represent a high percentage in every type of accident, showing that the frequency and quantity of traffic violations are closely related to the number of accidents.
Drivers who scored low in willfulness have a higher percentage of rear-end collisions, while those scoring high reported a greater proportion of right-turn/head-on collisions. It is also clear that drivers who were marked low in willfulness rate were high in pedestrian vs. vehicle collisions and those marked high had greater tendency toward
right-turn/head-on collisions. Drivers scoring low in alcohol-relatedness and those scoring high in this regard were both found to represent a higher rate of accidents regardless of accident type.
  One conclusion is that the traffic violations drivers commit are variously related to the types of accidents they tend to cause. Traffic offences can thus be regarded as reflecting character traits, which may be used for analyzing the process of accidents in detail.

Figure 6.  Distribution of Drivers by Levels of Violation Tendency and Types of Accident

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Institute for Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis (ITARDA)