The influence of economic incentives linked to road safety indicators on accidents: The case of toll concessions in Spain

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the incentives incorporated in toll highway concession contracts in order to encourage private operators to adopt measures to reduce accidents are actually effective at improving safety. To this end, we implemented negative binomial regression models using information about highway characteristics and accident data from toll highway concessions in Spain from 2007 to 2009. Our results show that even though road safety is highly influenced by variables that are not managed by the contractor, such as the annual average daily traffic (AADT), the percentage of heavy vehicles on the highway, number of lanes, number of intersections and average speed; the implementation of these incentives has a positive influence on the reduction of accidents and injuries. Consequently, this measure seems to be an effective way of improving safety performance in road networks.

Determination of accident-prone road sections using quantile regression

“…As expected, as the RL parameter was positive, this indicates an increase in the number of accidents as this variable increases, which is consistent with the reports by [13,22,23]. Similar behavior indicates the RW variable, i.e., the wider the roadway, the more interaction there is between the vehicles, which increases the probability of collisions; such a result is consistent with [24,25].…”

“…In addition, the statistical significance of the P50 estimator for the accident occurrence model is evident. However, the negative parameter indicates that an increase in the average speed of the study sections will result in a decrease in accidents, which is not a common result, even though it is consistent with the results reported by [22,27]. One of the possible causes of this result is that the SD of the average speed of the road sections is very low, therefore the speed range of those sections is also low.…”

“…One of the possible causes of this result is that the SD of the average speed of the road sections is very low, therefore the speed range of those sections is also low. In the case study, the SD value for the P50 variable is 7.81 kph, which is consistent with the evidence reported by [22] Table 1 were not taken into account in the model shown in Table 2, has they have no statistical significance.…”

Effects of the Attributes Associated with Roadway Geometry, Traffic Volumes and Speeds on the Incidence of Accidents in a Mid-Size City

“…A database was prepared containing the records of accidents that occurred in the urban perimeter of the municipality of Ocaña between the years 2007 and 2013 (up to August), which is suitable for this type of study according to reports of other investigations that calibrate models based on historical data for a shorter time period [12], [14], [20]. At the same time, and based on previous studies [3], we identified 15 road-traffic corridors for Ocaña.…”

“…Calibration of the accidentfrequency model was based on Poisson and NB regressions, seeing as there are plenty of studies in literature where they have been widely utilized [14]- [20]. Some studies make recommendations on the estimation of the model, as sometimes possible sources of error are evident in the prediction model due to the existence of collinearity between the dependent variables and an incorrect functional form of dependent and independent variables [21], [22].…”