Impact of the silver zone on the traffic accident rate of elderly pedestrians

Abstract

Background: To reduce elderly pedestrian traffic accidents, the South Korean government introduced the “Silver Zone” (Elderly Protection Area) program in 2007. Multiple measures such as lowering speed limits, zone-designation signs, installing speed bumps, unmanned cameras, or elevated crosswalks are permitted within the area. Methods: In this study, panel data with 16,633 observations by the district “Dong” (the smallest administrative district unit in South Korea) was created and analyzed by using Stata-17. With the data, fixed effect regression analysis has been performed to identify the impact of the Silver Zone installed in Seoul city from 2007 to 2022 on three kinds of traffic accident data- death rate, severe injury rate, and accident rate. This study also applied the interaction effect method to examine how the impact of the Silver Zone differs by gender. Findings: The installation of the Silver Zone is associated with a reduction in severe injury rate and traffic accident rate of elderly pedestrians, but it did not display statistically significant results for the death rate. Additionally, contrary to the hypothesis, the Silver Zone is less likely to be effective in reducing the traffic accidents of female elderly pedestrians who are the most prominently vulnerable population to traffic accidents, which raises necessity for the policy improvement.