2025 Volume 11 Issue 4 Pages A_48-A_57
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) has set a goal of promoting traffic safety measures for school routes from FY2024 onward, taking an areal view of the area around elementary schools, in order to foster an awareness that “children's safety comes first in the area around elementary schools. Here, it is important to understand the trends of traffic accident characteristics around elementary schools according to regional characteristics in order to formulate specific measures and prioritize the content of the measures with respect to areal measures. Therefore, in this study, the area within a 500-meter radius of an elementary school, which is generally considered to be within the school zone, was classified into three clusters: “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural,” and traffic accident characteristics were compared by the degree of injury in each cluster. The results revealed that the trends of traffic accident characteristics differ according to regional characteristics, and that the factors that cause serious injuries and fatalities also differ.
