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This is probably a fair and balanced summary: https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...01457518300873

Motor vehicle collisions cause more than 1.2 million deaths worldwide and an even greater number of non-fatal injuries each year (World Health Organization, 2015), negatively affecting the health and wellbeing of injury survivors and their families (Donaldson et al., 2009). To improve road safety, insight is needed into preventable causes of road accidents. Police reports of road accidents are the main source of data used for informing research and policy on the causes of road accidents. Concerns have been raised by academics and road safety authorities over the reliability of police-reported contributing factor data (DfT, 2014a), but there has been little or no attempt to investigate this issue empirically. This article aims to contribute to filling this gap by investigating the main causes of road accidents reported in accident records and comparing them with expert views of police officers and lay views of the driving public.

The causes of motor vehicle collisions are complex, but broadly depend on characteristics of drivers. Skill level (McGwin & Brown, 1999), inexperience (McCartt et al., 2003), and risk taking behaviors (Rolison et al., 2014) have been implicated in the collisions of young drivers compared to drivers in other age ranges. Investigations of vehicle collision records have also implicated excessive speed (Gonzales et al., 2005; Lam, 2003), driving recklessly (Lam, 2003), and traffic violations (Gonzales et al., 2005) as well as drugs and alcohol (Bingham et al., 2008) in the collisions of young drivers. For example, Braitman et al. (2008) interviewed 16-year-old novice drivers who had been involved in a collision within eight months of receiving their driver license. Excessive speed, loss of control, and failure to detect another vehicle or traffic control were reported by the teenagers as primary causes of their collisions (Braitman et al., 2008). Collectively, these findings support the role of inexperience, lack of skill, and risk taking behaviors in young driver collisions. Further, these contributing factors appear to be influenced by driver gender. Young male drivers are more likely than young females to be involved in collisions due to risk taking, such as excessive speeding and impairment by drugs and alcohol (Begg & Langley, 2004; Clarke et al., 2006; Curry et al., 2012).

In contrast with young drivers, the collisions of older drivers more often involve driver error at intersections and when making turns (Hakamies-Blomqvist, 1993; Langford & Koppel, 2006). McGwin and Brown (1999) found that failure to yield right of way, failure to comply with signs and signals, failure to see objects, and improper turns and lane changes were commonly reported in road accident records for collisions of older drivers. Older driver errors may in part result from age-related decline in visual, cognitive, and mobility functioning in older age (Hu et al., 1993; Janke, 1991). A wealth of research has identified poor performance on measures of visual functioning and cognitive abilities as risk factors for older driver involvement in road traffic collisions (Ball et al., 2010; Ball et al., 2006; Owsley et al., 1991; Owsley et al., 1998). Medical conditions, such as heart disease and stroke, are further associated with increased risk of collision among older drivers (McGwin et al., 2000; Anstey et al., 2005). Finally, psychoactive medications, commonly used by older drivers, can hamper their driving ability, and place them at increased risk of crash involvement (Hemmelgarn et al., 1997; Meuleners et al., 2011; Ray et al., 1992).

In sum, inexperience and risk taking behaviors, including excessive speed and drug and alcohol use, have been associated with the collisions of young drivers. Conversely, as age advances, increased prevalence of visual and cognitive impairments as well as medication use have been associated with the collisions of older drivers.