APPLYING LOCATION QUOTIENT TO ANALYZE DISTRICT ELDERLY ACCIDENT CHARACTERISTICS IN METROPOLITAN AREAS

Abstract

A location quotient (LQ) is an analytical statistic that measures a district’s or region’s industrial specialization relative to a larger geographic unit (usually the nation) in economic base analysis. While an LQ over 1.0 means that the area has a higher concentration for specific industry than the nation. In Taiwan, the population over the age of 65 of total population was 12.51% in the end of 2015. And from 2009 to 2015, the elderly population death rate of the total population in traffic accidents are 27.20%, 25.89%, 25.27%, 26.62%, 28.73%, 30.02% and 31.43% respectively. As the result of high elderly death rate, the traffic safety of seniors has become an important issue in Taiwan. Because the area accident characteristics are different by the local socio-economic conditions and resources and the area countermeasures must depend on local accident characteristics, this study applies the LQ index to analyze the accident characteristics by area. The LQ index were calculated by the district accidents share divided the metropolitan accidents share by different category such as accident severity, traffic mode, gender, occurrence time, occurrence location and causes of accident. The data of Taoyuan metropolis in Taiwan which are divided into 13 districts and with spatial and regional characteristics including urban, suburban and rural areas were used. The results showed that the application of LQ could easily identify the elderly safety issues of each districts. Moreover, this study developed the educational propaganda strategies for different districts to reduce the traffic accident rate and severity in seniors based on the traffic accident characteristic analysis.