DETERMINANTS OF SEVERE INJURY AND FATAL TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS ON URBAN AND RURAL HIGHWAYS

Based on the recent Safety Fact Sheet, highway traffic accidents are becoming one of the leading causes of death. The main goal of this work is to study the correlation, impacts and the association of several highway pavements and geometric design elements, the prevailing traffic characteristics and environmental conditions on severe traffic crashes occurred over the five years period from 2010 to 2014 on selected two and four-lane rural and urban highways in the state of Alabama. Several state urban and rural highways with homogeneous variances, equal mean values and similar distributions of the crashes are identified and combined to form crash datasets. The significance of the initial categorical variables on the likelihood of generating severe crashes on dry and wet pavement surfaces are evaluated. The negative binomial regression model is used to estimate the observed crash data and identify the principal variables associated with the crashes.