The 2013 Partial Amendment of the Disaster Countermeasures Basic Law mandated that a roster of vulnerable persons during disasters be created, and further development of evacuation support is expected. In this study, the number of vulnerable people living in target analytical areas are identified in terms of neighborhood units by using the National Health Insurance Database to create a realistic and efficient evacuation support plan. Later, after considering the “vulnerability” of an area to earthquake disaster damage, a quantitative evaluation of the state of the disaster is performed using a principle component analysis that further divided the analytical target areas into neighborhood units to make a detailed determination of the number of disaster-vulnerable persons, the severity of the disaster, etc. The results of the disaster evaluation performed after considering the vulnerability of an area are that 628 disaster-vulnerable persons live in areas with a relatively higher disaster evaluation value.

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In Japan, where the birthrate continues to decline, various initiatives are underway to promote traffic safety for children. Although these efforts have helped reduce the number of traffic accidents involving children, an examination of the circumstances under which children were killed or injured in traffic accidents in recent years shows that accidents in which children were riding bicycles accounted for the highest percentage of accidents. We investigated the relationship between the ages of children involved in traffic accidents and violations of traffic laws using traffic accident statistics maintained by the Ishikawa Prefectural Police Headquarters. These records revealed that 16-year-olds were most likely to be involved in traffic accidents. Our analysis of the violations of laws and ordinances with respect to the ages of bicyclists involved in car accidents at intersections found that, of all the age categories, elementary school students had the lowest rate of accidents with no violations and the highest rate of accidents involving a failure to stop. Junior and senior high school students had lower rates of accidents involving a failure to stop than elementary school students. Moreover, at non-intersections, driving safety violations were notably higher for accidents involving bicycling elementary school students than for those in other age groups.

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