Factors Influencing Increase in Driving Fatalities in Nowruz 2018

According to the 2018 Norouz casualty statistics (from March 24, 2017 to April 14, 2018), which indicates a growth of 18.2%, the main question of the research is what parameters have been effective in increasing these statistics. With this description, this research is aimed at presenting executive and short-term solutions to reduce the number of Nowruz 2018 traffic fatalities and to reduce the number of fatalities in the coming years. This research is applied in terms of purpose, and in terms of implementation, it combines both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the qualitative part, in-depth interviews were used and in the quantitative part, a researcher-made questionnaire was used. Content validity was used to validate the questionnaire and Cronbach''s alpha for reliability of the questionnaire. The data were analyzed in two parts: descriptive and inferential. Overall, the results show that the human factor with β = 0.961, technical factor with β = 0.660, the path defect with β = 0.046, the path factor with β = 0.146, road factor condition with β = 0.046 , road margin factor with β = 0.012 beta, visual barriers factor with β = 0.08, and road safety factor with β = -0.614, have a meaningful share in explaining human casualties in Nowruz 2018. Qualitative research results show that among human factors, driver fatigue and drowsiness, alcohol consumption and driver''s lack of familiarity with the road; among technical factors, vehicle lighting system failure, braking system failure; among environmental factors (road and weather), type of road margin, low road safety and road defects have been effective in increasing the number of road casualties in Nowruz 2018. Adaptive indicators of the four factors on increasing road fatalities in 2018 based on Friedman test show that among the four factors, human factors in the first priority, technical factors in the second priority and environmental factors in the third priority in terms of impact on the road casualties.