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Exploring the Impacts of Safety Culture on Immigrants’ Vulnerability in Non-motorized Crashes: A Cross-sectional Study

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Abstract

Pedestrians and cyclists are a vulnerable group of road users. Immigrants are disproportionally represented in pedestrian and cyclist crashes. We postulate that the mismatch in safety culture between countries of their origin and the USA contribute to their vulnerability in pedestrian and cyclist crashes. Over time, the differences may disappear and immigrants’ traffic behavior gravitates toward those of native-borns. We describe this process as safety assimilation. Using the pedestrian and cyclist crash database in New York City between 2001 and 2003, we examined the effects of foreign-born population, their countries of origin, and time of entry into the USA on census tract-level pedestrian and cyclist crashes. We find that neighborhoods with a higher concentration of immigrants, especially those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia, have more crashes. Our results also exhibit a pattern of the hypothesized safety assimilation process. The study suggests a higher level of vulnerability of immigrants to pedestrian and cyclist crashes. We propose that targeted policies and programs need to be developed for immigrants of different countries of origin.

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Notes

  1. Some studies use crash rate, i.e., number of crashes per population as the dependent variable. This specification indirectly assumes a linear relationship between number of crashes and population size, which may not be necessarily true. Instead, we use the number of crashes as the dependent variable—and control the impact from population by having daytime population density and its quadratic term as independent variables in the regression models.

  2. The US Census 2000 divided Europe into four parts: northern, western, southern, and eastern. The eastern part used by Census appears to comprise that section commonly referred to as “Eastern Europe.” We refer to the other three parts as “the rest of Europe.”

  3. These variables were selected to minimize multiple correlations among them. Only those with variance inflation factor less than 10 were chosen.

  4. We tested running regression models separately using pedestrian-only crashes and cyclist-only crashes. The estimates are similar to each other, thus we combined pedestrian crashes and cyclist crashes together in a single dependent variable.

  5. This variable is included in the model to distinguish between “minority” effect and “immigrant” effect. The latter is what we are interested in the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Cynthia Chen

  2. Civil Engineering Department, City College of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Haiyun Lin

  3. Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

    Becky P.Y. Loo

Authors
  1. Cynthia Chen
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  2. Haiyun Lin
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  3. Becky P.Y. Loo
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Correspondence to Cynthia Chen.

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Chen, C., Lin, H. & Loo, B.P. Exploring the Impacts of Safety Culture on Immigrants’ Vulnerability in Non-motorized Crashes: A Cross-sectional Study. J Urban Health 89, 138–152 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-011-9629-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-011-9629-7

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