Assessment of Worldwide Pedestrian Mortality Rate Patterns: 1990-2015

Pedestrians are considered as the most vulnerable road users. In this study, the pattern of global pedestrian deaths was assessed using Latent Growth Model and Latent Growth Mixture Model. In this longitudinal study, pedestrian deaths rates data of 195 countries from 1990 to 2015 for men, women and total of them, were extracted from the Global Barden of Disease website. Initially, the overall pedestrian death rate pattern was assessed by LGM and then the GMM was used to explore heterogeneity in the population and categorization the countries based on their pedestrian death rate patterns. All statistical analysis and drawing geographical maps were performed using Mplus 6.12 and ArcGIS 10.3, respectively. The nonlinear LGM was better fitted than the linear LGM. The nonlinear LGM results show that the estimated intercept for men, women and total of them was 10.84, 4.77 and 7.83, and the estimated slope was -1.01, -0.47 and -0.75, respectively. According to pedestrian death rate, the LGMM, classify the countries into 5 classes with five different patterns. Generally, the pedestrian deaths rates had a nonlinear decreasing pattern, but this decreasing pattern is different for each country. Therefore, in order to reduce pedestrian fatality rate in the world, different approaches need to be considered for each of five groups.