News Media Mining to Explore Speed-Crash-Traffic Association During COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of everyone from almost every perspective. Research communities from many domains have contributed to quantifying and mitigating the influence of the ongoing pandemic. The public depend on news media for reliable information. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, many news media articles started to report on quieter roads resulting from travel restriction and work from home mandates, but also more excessive speeding and more traffic fatalities. Although the news media’s representation of the crash-speed association is often not based on data-driven safety analysis, the extent to which the media place emphasis on such news content has never been adequately quantified. The current study performed content analysis and text mining (both text network analysis and topic modeling) to explore the representations of speed-crash association in news media (local, national, and international) to provide insights into the generated news content. Findings reveal that topics such as a surge in fatal crashes, careless driving, driving under the influence, law enforcement, and equity issues, as well as impacts on pedestrians and bicyclists, were frequently highlighted by local, national, and international news media during the pandemic era.

Impacts of COVID-19 on Motor Vehicle Crash Frequency and Severity by Functional Classification and Land Use Context

“…This important finding is supported by our own work. The primary mechanism behind the worse severity outcomes across the US and internationally appears to be more speeding, followed by more driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol and less seat belt use (Das & Sarkar, 2022;Gong et al, 2023). As was present in Region 6, outcomes were worse for vulnerable road users in Utah, across the US, and internationally (Das & Sarkar, 2022;Gong et al, 2023).…”

“…For instance, although there were fewer overall crashes during the COVID-19 lockdowns in California and Utah, the rate of fatal and severe crashes got worse (Gong et al, 2023;Grembek et al, 2022). Similarly, an international analysis of news articles suggests that severity rates got worse across the US and in Colombia, India, and Japan (Das & Sarkar, 2022). These results suggest that it is possible to experience a reduction in overall crashes without making the system safer in terms of fatal and severe crashes, which is the key metric for efforts such as Vision Zero.…”

“…The primary mechanism behind the worse severity outcomes across the US and internationally appears to be more speeding, followed by more driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol and less seat belt use (Das & Sarkar, 2022;Gong et al, 2023). As was present in Region 6, outcomes were worse for vulnerable road users in Utah, across the US, and internationally (Das & Sarkar, 2022;Gong et al, 2023). In terms of land use, while our work was the only research we found exploring the rural/ urban continuum, our findings may be mirrored in research that found that COVID-19 crashes were likely to migrate from higher-income areas to lower-income areas in New York City and Los Angeles, which may be related to the migration we saw to more rural areas (Lin et al, 2021).…”

Probing into Driver Speeding Patterns and Their Influence on Child Occupancy in Urban Areas

“…The likelihood of driver's mistakes resulting from the high speed compounds with loss of control of the vehicle and failure to anticipate and avoid risk in a timely manner. Although many studies have examined the speed-crash association and the association between driver behavior and the presence of passengers (47)(48)(49)(50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55), examination of the presence of child occupants has not been explored as extensively. The unique contribution of this paper is that it explores the patterns of speeding behavior with child occupancy by utilizing household travel survey data from multiple study areas in Texas.…”