Analytic Methods in Accident Research最新文献

To minimize non-recurrent congestion, a better understanding of the factors that affect accident clearance time is crucial, in order to optimize incident management strategies. A number of methods have been developed to predict incident clearance duration, but few of those have considered the time-varying nature of certain observed factors. In addressing this gap in the literature, this study developed a grouped random parameters hazard-based duration model with time-varying covariates, while accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. Data on accidents, traffic, road inventory, and real-time weather condition were compiled for the Kaiyang freeway in 2014. Comparison of candidate models shows that the proposed model with Weibull distribution exhibits the best fit performance. The results suggest that the effects of rear-end accident, involvements of trucks or other vehicles, evening hours, and shoulder blockage on the hazard function are heterogeneous across observations. Other variables such as angle accident, injury severity, traffic volume and composition, morning or pre-dawn hours, and blockage of overtaking lane were also found to have significant but homogenous effects on accident clearance time. More importantly, the results also reveal the significant effects of the time-varying covariates (wind speed, temperature, and humidity). Accordingly, the viability and superiority of the proposed model in analyzing accident clearance time are confirmed. Overall, the results of this study are expected not only to improve traffic incident management by allowing government agencies to better understand factors affecting accident clearance times, but also to facilitate incident clearance through the recognition of time-varying pattern.

Research in highway safety continues to struggle to address two potentially important issues; the role that unobserved factors may play on resulting crash and injury-severity likelihoods, and the issue of identification in safety modeling caused by the self-selective sampling inherent in commonly used safety data (the fact that drivers in observed crashes are not a random sample of the driving population, with riskier drivers being over-represented in crash data bases). This paper addresses unobserved heterogeneity using mixing distributions and attempts to provide insight into the potential sample-selection problem by considering data before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a survey of vehicle usage (vehicle miles traveled) and subsequent statistical modeling, there is evidence that riskier drivers likely made up a larger proportion of vehicle miles traveled during the pandemic than before, suggesting that the increase in injury severities observed during COVID-19 could potentially be due to the over-representation of riskier drivers in observed crash data. However, by exploring Florida crash data before and during the pandemic (and focusing on crashes where risky behaviors were observed), the empirical analysis of observed crash data suggests (using random parameters multinomial logit models of driver-injury severities with heterogeneity in means and variances) that the observed increase in injury severity during the COVID-19 pandemic (calendar year 2020) was likely due largely to fundamental changes in driver behavior and less to changes in the sample selectivity of observed crash data. The findings of this paper provide some initial guidance to future work that can begin to more rigorously explore and assess the role of selectivity and resulting identification issues that may be present when using observed crash data.

Pedestrians represent a vulnerable road user group at signalised intersections. As such, properly estimating pedestrian crash risk at discrete short intervals is important for real-time safety management. This study proposes a novel real-time vehicle-pedestrian crash risk modelling framework for signalised intersections. At the core of this framework, a Bayesian Generalised Extreme Value modelling approach is employed to estimate crash risk in real-time from traffic conflicts captured by post encroachment time. A Block Maxima sampling approach, corresponding to a Generalised Extreme Value distribution, is used to identify pedestrian conflicts at the traffic signal cycle level. Several signal-level covariates are used to capture the time-varying heterogeneity of traffic extremes, and the crash risk of different signal cycles is also addressed within the Bayesian framework. The proposed framework is operationalised using a total of 144 hours of traffic movement video data from three signalised intersections in Queensland, Australia. To obtain signal cycle-level covariates, an automated covariate extraction algorithm is used that fuses three data sources (trajectory database from the video feed, traffic conflict database, and signal timing database) to obtain various covariates to explain time-varying crash risk across different cycles. Results show that the model provides a reasonable estimate of historical crash records at the study sites. Utilising the fitted generalised extreme value distribution, the proposed model provides real-time crash estimates at a signal cycle level and can differentiate between safe and risky signal cycles. The real-time crash risk model also helps understand the differential crash risk of pedestrians at a signalised intersection across different periods of the day. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential for the proposed real-time framework in estimating the vehicle-pedestrian crash risk at the signal cycle level, allowing proactive safety management and the development of real-time risk mitigation strategies for pedestrians.

A copula-based dependence approach accommodates various facets of dependence structures in building multivariate stochastic models. In existing studies, applications of copula for ordinal random variables are predominantly modeled by employing traditional ordered models (ordered logit/probit) while assuming the effects of parameters to remain the same across all observations. The methodological contributions of this study are grounded in addressing the abovementioned significant methodological gaps in the application of copula formulation by proposing a copula-based random parameters nominal-ordinal joint model construct of correlated random variables. Specifically, we propose and develop a random parameters binary logit-generalized ordered logit copula formulation while also complementing the proposed approach by accommodating the effects of unobserved heterogeneity in parameter estimates. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first instance to incorporate generalized ordered formulation within copula in extant econometrics literature. Further, to obtain a direct effect of exogenous variables on dependence, we parameterize the copula dependence structure as a function of different covariates in six different copula structures including a wide range of dependency structures which represent radial symmetry and asymmetry, and asymptotic tail dependence. The empirical contributions of this study are grounded in the application of the proposed copula-based formulation by examining ‘active traveler (pedestrian and bicyclist) crash type’ and ‘active traveler injury severity outcomes’ as two dimensions of active travel injury severity mechanism. The model is estimated by using crash data for the years 2012 through 2018 from the state of Queensland, Australia, by employing a comprehensive set of exogenous variables. In addition, the analyses are further augmented by complementing the elasticity effects of exogenous variables.

In conventional safety analysis, traffic and crash data are often aggregated at the geographical units like census tracts, street blocks, and traffic analysis zones, which are often delineated by roads and other physical entities. A considerable proportion of crashes may occur at or near the boundary of geographical units. Such the crashes, also known as boundary crashes, can correlate with the explanatory variables of neighboring geographical units, regardless of the spatial proximity. This could then bias the parameter estimation of crash frequency model. In this study, a novel data-driven approach is developed for the allocation of boundary crashes. For example, crash severity and bicyclist characteristics are considered in the crash feature-based allocation. An illustrative case study based on built environment, population, traffic and bicycle crash data from 289 Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) of London in the period 2017–2019 was conducted. Results indicate that high matching percentages of boundary crash allocation can be achieved. Furthermore, prediction performances, in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE), of the crash frequency models based on the proposed crash feature-based allocation method is superior, compared to that based on conventional boundary crash allocation methods like half-and-half and iterative assignment approaches. Last but not least, more influencing factors that affect the bicycle crash frequency at macroscopic level can be identified. Findings should be indicative to the spatial safety analysis for different geographical configurations.

Crashes at highway-rail grade crossings often result in higher proportion of injury and fatality of the vehicle occupants as compared to other crash types, necessitating in-depth investigation to identify their causal factors. In this study, injury-severity outcomes from highway-rail grade crossing crashes are analyzed using crash data from Texas and California, which are the most vulnerable states in the United States, in terms of highway-rail grade crossing crash occurrences. The data are collected from the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) Office of Safety Analysis, covering a period between 2012 and 2020. Such data often suffer from out-of-date or missing information due to cost and available resources limitations, which inevitably may lead to unobserved characteristics varying systematically across various aspects of the data. Unobserved heterogeneity is an important misspecification issue, that in turn introduces modeling bias. To address these limitations, the random parameters multinomial logit modeling framework with heterogeneity in the means and variances is employed for the econometric analysis in this paper, which effectively accounts for multilayered unobserved heterogeneity. Spatial instability of the factors affecting different injury-severity levels is investigated as well. The results indicate that the factors are not spatially stable across Texas and California, leading to the estimation of two separate state-specific models. The estimation results of the two state-specific models help identify several vehicle-, train-, vehicle driver-, weather- and crossing-specific factors affecting different injury severity outcomes. Moreover, the results also demonstrate the varying magnitude of the identified factors on injury-severity across the two states, indicating the presence of spatial instability. The findings of this study highlight the importance of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and spatial instability to avert critical methodological issues and misleading inferences from the simple aggregation used in most econometric analysis of highway-rail grade crossing crashes.

A novel and effective approach to safety management requires evaluating the safety of locations over short time periods (e.g. minutes). Unlike traditional methods that are based on aggregate crash records over a few years, crash proneness in this approach reflects short-time durations and is related to dynamic traffic changes and dangerous driving events. This paper proposes a new approach to dynamically assess the crash proneness of traffic conditions within a very short time (e.g., signal cycle length) and to dynamically identify high-risk locations. Using a Bayesian hierarchal Extreme Value Theory (EVT) model, the short-term crash risk metrics, risk of crash (ROC), and return level (RL), are calculated using traffic conflict data. A short-term hazardous location identification and ranking framework is developed based on crash-risk threshold exceedances for every short-term analysis period. By further investigating the variation in short-term crash risk, longer-term hazardous location identification and ranking metrics such as the longer-term crash risk index (LTCRI) and the percent of time exceeding (PTE) were developed. Using these metrics, a framework is proposed by which hazardous intersections can be dynamically classified and ranked in both the short-term and the longer-term. This ranking may be dynamically updated as more data becomes available. The proposed framework was applied to a trajectory dataset consisting of 47 signalized intersections obtained from a UAV-based dataset. Conflicts were identified from vehicle trajectories and were used to compute the proposed short-term and longer-term metrics. The intersections within the network were then ranked based on the proposed framework. This study demonstrates the importance of investigating short-term fluctuations in crash risk that may otherwise be lost to averaging in longer-term analysis and proposes a simple and practical solution.

The current study contributes to safety literature by incorporating the influence of temporal factors (observed and unobserved) within a multivariate model system for medical professional generated body region specific injury severity score. For this purpose, we adopt a hybrid econometric modeling approach that accommodates for the unobserved factors using two mechanisms. First, we parameterize unobserved temporal factor variation through the customization of the variance by time cohort (heteroscedasticity). Second, the common unobserved factors affecting severity across various body regions is accommodated through traditional random parameter consideration process. The proposed model system is estimated using data drawn from the National Automotive Sampling System-Crashworthiness Data System (NASS-CDS) database for the time cohorts 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2015. For the current analysis, we consider 6-point Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) for eight body regions (head, face, neck, abdomen, thorax, spine, lower extremity, and upper extremity). The proposed model system offers interesting insights on body region severity evolution over time. The model estimation is augmented with post-estimation exercises including hold-out sample validation analysis, illustrative policy analysis and extensive elasticity effect computation.

This paper presents a negative binomial random parameter model with heterogeneity in means and variance to capture the effect of heterogeneous effect of ramp type, alignment, truck volume and interchange geometry and on freeway ramp crash frequency. Two years (2018–2019) of crash data on freeway ramps in Washington State were analyzed. Model estimation results show ramp type (directional, semi-directional and loop), alignment, and traffic characteristics significantly impact ramp crash frequency. The northwest loop ramp indicator has a random parameter. The minimum horizontal curve radius and the total number of vertical curves on the ramp appear to be statistically significant sources of heterogeneity in the mean of this parameter. Heterogeneity in the mean of the random effect is influenced by single truck percentage and the low AADT indicator (<=1,340 vehicles per day).

Heterogeneity in the variance of the northwest loop ramp random parameter appears to be associated with the southwest loop ramp indicator indicating unobserved effects due to same-side loop geometries.

Directional ramp indicators (on- and off-ramps) and interactions involving speed limit, AADT and horizontal curve radius are statistically significant (as fixed parameters) in their impact on ramp crash frequency.

Total centerline mile footprint of all ramps at the interchange is a continuous fixed parameter effect. Ramp-specific lengths (longer than 0.335 miles) also appear to be statistically significant. The findings in this study suggest that ramp and interchange design need to account for a holistic integration of spatial footprint, type of ramp and alignment factors, in addition to traffic flow variables.

Developing robust and reliable statistical models to estimate, analyze, and understand crash data is a key element in various highway safety evaluation tasks. Crash data have characteristics not found in other data, including but not limited to the excess number of zero responses. The Negative Binomial-Lindley (NB-L) model has been proposed as a method to analyze data with many zero observations. In addition, the differences in various temporal and spatial factors result in variations of model coefficients among different groups of observations. A grouped random parameters model is a strategy to account for such unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we proposed the derivations and applications of the grouped random parameters negative binomial-Lindley model (G-RPNB-L) to account for the unobserved heterogeneity in crash data with many zero observations. We first illustrated our proposed model by designing a simulation study. The simulation study showed the ability of the proposed model to correctly estimate the coefficients. Then, we used an empirical dataset in Maine to show the application of the proposed model. We showed that the impact of weather variables denoting “Days with precipitation greater than 1.0 in.”, and “Days with temperature less than 32°F” varies across Maine counties. We also compared the proposed model with the NB, NB-L, and grouped random-parameters NB (G-RPNB) models using different goodness-of-fit metrics. The proposed G-RPNB-L model showed a superior fit compared to the other models.