1. Introduction
The Global status reported a high number of road traffic deaths per year, approximately 1.35 million [
1]. The situation analysis reports that major casualties are due to human-related issues, therefore handling them becomes the highest dynamic target of road safety actions [
2]. Human factors have been estimated to be a sole or leading causal factor in approximately 90% of road traffic accidents [
3,
4,
5]. The previous study focused on road safety primary factors. Driving behavior, driver risk perception and experience were the fundamental factors that impacted road safety [
6].
There are usually significant differences in driving practice between countries [
7]. The driver behavior significantly varies from country to country with different traffic risk perception [
8]. A comparison study was conducted to investigate the perceived risks variations of traffic accidents in various countries e.g., North American and Japan. The results indicated that participants from Japan projected a higher risk of traffic accidents than participants from North American [
9]. The cultural differences were evaluated in risk perception, driver behavior and traffic safety approaches in Norway and Ghana. Higher traffic risk was observed for younger age groups as compared to older ones in both countries [
10].
Naturalistic driving is a recently employed research method, studying road users’ everyday driving situation, instead of in a scientific experiment. For a long time, controlled experiments such as self-reporting questionnaires, driving simulators were the basic method of examining driving behavior. The main advantage of this type of experiment is the huge degree of control over the variables that (may) influence driving behavior. However, controlled experiments are very often performed in a designed environment. This causes the transfer of the results to real traffic more difficult [
11,
12]. Within traffic studies with specific goals to study driver behavior, the scientific investigation related to naturalistic driving (ND) examination has increasingly gained significance in the last years [
13,
14].
Several studies have used multi-criteria decision-making applications to evaluate human behavior [
15,
16,
17]. A review of road safety models in the literature has shown that several studies have proposed approaches based on multi-criteria decision-making analysis to calculate road safety problems [
18,
19,
20,
21]. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was the best approach to prioritize suburban road safety indicators to access the factors that can decrease traffic accidents as well as the severity of accidents in Iran [
22]. Regardless of the benefits of the multi-criteria decision-making method of the AHP, this method is usually subject to some inabilities [
23]. The AHP method prioritization may not be accurate because of the subjective judgment by perception; evaluation, improvement and selection that is solely the preference of decision-makers have a great influence on the output of AHP. Moreover, some of the participants who are asked to fill the questionnaires may not be completely conscious of the significance of some of the indicators [
24]. The inconsistency and the associated uncertainty may be increased for that current research when participants compare the driver behavior indicators beyond indicators related to road safety.
To manage these tricky problems, some techniques have been used along with the AHP to minimize the associated uncertainty and the inconsistency, such as using the inter connections [
25], frequency ratio [
26,
27,
28], sensitivity and uncertainty analysis [
29], interval calculations [
24], modified analytical hierarchy process [
30], weights-of-evidence bivariate statistical model [
31]. However, many researchers integrate fuzzy theory with AHP to deal with the associated uncertainty within the comparisons [
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37]. The Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is a more precise technique as compared to AHP. AHP technique lacks in the human thinking behavior area which is more precise in the case of FAHP. So, FAHP can be considered as more accurate as compared to AHP in terms of human response and accuracy [
38].
The main aim of the current study is to evaluate and compare the significant driving behavior criteria between specified driving cultures (countries) by utilizing the FAHP framework. The Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ) survey designed on the fuzzy scale is used to assess the responses of evaluators on perceived road issues. To better estimate the significance of the driver behavior criteria for road safety, the study analyzes twenty hypothetical driver behavior factors by pairwise comparison. A comprehensive FAHP approach is further used to assign weights to each examined factor and quantify the relative importance of each factor. Finally, the study highlights the most fundamental driver behavior factors solely related to road safety for each region. Meanwhile, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance was measured to show the degree of agreement between evaluator groups for each level.
4. Discussion
This study is investigative in providing a comprehensive analysis of the important driver behavior factors related to road safety for different driving cultures. The study results evaluated that each country has its own traffic safety issues related to driver behavior. The findings revealed “violations” as the most significant driver behavior criteria for level 1 from all designated regions except Hungary. While for Hungary drivers, “errors” is observed as the most significant criterion followed by “violations”. Furthermore, the FAHP results found “aggressive violations” as first rank criteria for level 2 from evaluators of Hungary, Pakistan and China. Meanwhile, Turkish drivers evaluated “driver inattention” as first rank criteria for level 2. A recent comparative study found that Turkey drivers with specific norms showed more errors and fewer positive behaviors [
67]. However, the last rank criteria observed in level 2 for different countries are “ordinary violation” (Hungary and Turkey), “visual scan wrongly” (Pakistan) and “visual perception failure” (China). Furthermore, the study results found “fail to yield pedestrian” as the most significant driver behavior criteria for level 3 from Pakistan and China drivers. The previous study also noticed that the Chinese drivers tend not to decelerate to a full stop when passing an unsignalized intersection [
68]. Meanwhile, Turkey and Hungary drivers evaluated the “drive with alcohol use” as the most significant driver behavior criteria for level 3. The last rank observed driver behavior criteria in level 3 for different regions are “fail to maintain safe gap (Hungary and Turkey), “frequently changing lanes (Pakistan) and “no deterrence of punishing” (China). Finally, Kendall’s agreement test was performed to measure the concordance coefficient (W) between specified driver groups for each level of hierarchical structure. The Kendall’s agreement test results showed medium agreement between observed drivers’ groups for level 1 and level 2. Meanwhile, for level 3, Kendall’s agreement test results showed weak agreement between observed groups. Finally, the study recommends that high-rank driver behavior factors should be focused on planning the road safety campaigns to improve the risk perception of road safety. In addition, the study recommends that high-rank risky driver behavior factors should be analyzed for different maneuver transition probabilities as utilized in Ref. [
69] using driving simulators. Finally, for quality control of driving data, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) could be useful for extracting driving patterns, and for detecting events, among others [
70,
71].
5. Conclusions
Human behavior is considered as complex and often uncertain in assigning the causes of road accidents by using conventional AHP. However, FAHP can overcome this problem by capturing the ambiguity of the human thinking style. Therefore, in the current study, a well proved multi-criteria decision-making method, the fuzzy AHP is used for comparison and prioritization of significant driver behavior criteria and sub-criteria among the different traffic cultures (Hungary, Turkey, Pakistan and China). We utilized the DBQ designed on the fuzzy scale for evaluation purposes based on PCs. The FAHP method measured the weights of driver behavior criteria and sub-criteria which enables us to rank these criteria in a three-level hierarchical structure for all specified regions. Meanwhile, Kendall’s agreement test was used to check the agreement degree between observed groups for each level of hierarchical structure.
The FAHP study results highlighted the significant driver behavior criteria affecting road safety for different traffic cultures. All this important information could be useful to make the drivers aware of its own traffic risks for each country. Linkage of the observed data with traffic authorities may help to adopt effective local road safety strategies. FAHP method should be used in future research to analyze other significant road traffic elements and their sub-factors related to road safety such as road infrastructure, vehicles, traffic operators and environment.