Motorized Vehicle Safety

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are frequently used to analyze collision data. In order to 3 utilize GIS, the data must be geocoded, or assigned a latitude and longitude coordinate by 4 translating a descriptive location onto street network data. However, the ability for accurate 5 spatial analysis can be limited by geocoding errors that may occur due to limitations in data 6 collection technologies, incorrect data entry due to human error, or inaccurate street reference 7 data. In the state of California there is an increased opportunity for data entry errors, given the 8 long...

Background: Alcohol-impaired driving accounts for substantial proportion of traffic-related fatalities in the U.S. Risk perceptions for drinking and driving have been associated with various measures of drinking and driving behavior. In an effort to understand how to intervene and to better understand how risk perceptions may be shaped, this study explored whether an objective environmental-level measure (proportion of alcohol-involved driving crashes in one’s residential city) were related to individual-level perceptions and behavior.

Methods: Using data from a 2012 cross-sectional...

The objective of this work is to identify better metrics of exposure when comparing traffic crash risk across modes or across locations. We propose that total time travelled should be used for road user exposure to crash risk. The idea behind this is that travel time reflects the differences in speeds across different modes and hence should be used as the basic exposure metric from which crash risk based on other metrics, such as travel distance, can easily be derived. We also propose that when comparing crash risk of different modes across different locations the time-based mode share...

The high potential for occurrence and the negative consequences of secondary accidents make them an issue of great concern affecting freeway safety. Using accident records from a three-year period together with California interstate freeway loop data, a dynamic method for more accurate classification based on the traffic shock wave detecting method was used to identify secondary accidents. Spatio-temporal gaps between the primary and secondary accident were proven be fit via a mixture of Weibull and normal distribution. A logistic regression model was developed to investigate major factors...