Pavlou D., Frintzilas G., Angelopoulou E., Kontaxopoulou D., Fragkiadaki S., Stanitsa E., Yannis G., Papageorgiou S., “Can we predict safe driving for the elderly through a self-assessment of driving behaviour?”, Proceedings of the 11th International Congress on Transportation Research (Heraklion, Greece, 20-22 September 2023)

The aim of this paper is to obtain practical knowledge that will improve existing driving recommendations by indicating those drivers of over than 60 years old that might have a dangerous driving performance through a self-assessment driving behaviour questionnaire. The methodological approach includes correlation of a driver behavior questionnaire with driving behaviour indicators of older drivers who completed a driving simulator experiment. For this purpose, a structured self-assessment questionnaire was developed and filled in by more than 100 older participants. Afterwards, the older drivers went through a “driving at the simulator” experiment which included driving in rural and urban driving environment with normal conditions while some unexpected incidents were scheduled to occur during the driving sessions in order to study their reaction time and their accident probability. Results indicated that the older drivers who self-declared that their driving skills have been deteriorated over the last five years in a great extent, were actually the slower drivers, they had the more driving errors, had the worse reaction times and the higher accident probability. The older drivers who avoid driving alone had almost 100% accident probability in an unexpected incident. Overall, there are clear patterns which older drivers follow in their self-assessment answers indicating unsafe driving behaviour and this is validated by the simulator experiment.