Analysis of the Risk Factors Affecting the Severity of Traffic Accidents on Spanish Crosstown Roads: The Driver’s Perspective

Abstract

Globally, road traffic accidents are an important public health concern which needs to be tackled. A multidisciplinary approach is required to understand what causes them and to provide the evidence for policy support. In Spain, one of the roads with the highest fatality rate is the crosstown road, a particular type of rural road in which urban and interurban traffic meet, producing conflicts and interference with the population. This paper contributes to the previous existing research on the Spanish crosstown roads, providing a new vision that had not been analyzed so far: the driver’s perspective. The main purpose of the investigation is to identify the contributing factors that increment the likelihood of a fatal outcome based on single-vehicle crashes, which occurred on Spanish crosstown roads in the period 2006-2016. In order to achieve this aim, 1064 accidents have been analyzed, applying a latent cluster analysis as an initial tool for the fragmentation of crashes. Next, a multinomial logit (MNL) model was applied to find the most important factors involved in driver injury severity. The statistical analysis reveals that factors such as lateral crosstown roads, low traffic volumes, higher percentages of heavy vehicles, wider lanes, the non-existence of road markings, and finally, infractions, increase the severity of the drivers’ injuries.

Influence of Wider Longitudinal Road Markings on Vehicle Speeds in Two-Lane Rural Highways

“…As no similar studies have been found, making it impossible to compare the results obtained, it can be stated that the speed-reduction effect of the wider marks seen here is in line with the results of somewhat similar experiments about the effects of longitudinal speed reduction markings [26,27], and the consequences of implementing, or not, longitudinal road markings [29][30][31]. The speed-reducing effect may contribute to a reduction in the number of accidents associated with the implementation of wider longitudinal road markings [9,25,28] or the narrowing of lanes [6].…”

“…These results may, indirectly, be associated with traffic speed-at low speed (with dense traffic) it is easier to keep the vehicle in the center of the lane than at high speed (with low traffic). Regarding the influence of the lane width in traffic accidents, Casado-Sanz et al [6] looked into 1064 accidents in the period 2006-2016 in two-lane rural highways in Spain, finding that the occurrence of fatal injury is greater in the wider lanes (45.80% in the lanes over 3.75 m wide, 41.40% in the lanes having a width under 3.25 m, and 32.30% in those of intermediate width).…”

“…In addition, two-lane rural highways presented major problems of non-compliance with speed limits [5]. According to Casado-Sanz et al [6], the severity of the drivers' injuries in this type of accident is related to low traffic volumes, higher percentages of heavy vehicles, infractions, wider lanes, and the non-existence of road markings. Road markings are known to play a key role in traffic safety, and wider road markings generate a perception of a narrowing lane, which may induce drivers to reduce speed and improve road safety.…”

Road accident prediction and model interpretation using a hybrid K-means and random forest algorithm approach

“…In this study, the ANN model compared with the proposed Hybrid model. The Comparative performance of both models showed that the proposed model (Hybrid K means and random forest) performed better than the ANN model in terms of Precision, Recall, F1 score, Gu et al [21] PSO-SVM China -Xiao et al [52] SVM, KNN (Ensemble) I-880 data set 99.33% Castro et al [15] BN, JR8 and MLP DVSA-UK 72.39%, 72.02%, 71.70% Respectively Al-Radaideh et al [4] RF, ANN (backpropagation), SVM Uk 80.6%, 61.4%, 54.8% respectively Casado et al [14] LCC, MNL Spain -Wahab et al [51] MLP. SimpleCart, PART Ghana 72.16%, 73.45%, 73.81% respectively Sameen et al [40] MLP, BLR, RNN Malaysia 65.48%, 58.30%, 71.77% respectively Fentahun [18] J48, ID3, PART Ethiopia 81.21%, 81.01%, 81.18% Seid et al [42] HMR Ethiopia NA Abebe et al [1] DSA Ethiopia -Lytin et al [30] UBA Ethiopia - and Accuracy.…”

Towards Sustainable Cities: Utilizing Floating Car Data to Support Location-Based Road Network Performance Measurements

“…The generated noise has a significant health impact [35,36] such as sleep disturbance and anxiety [37]. In addition to that, the number of accidents happening can depend on the road network [38][39][40].…”