Abstract
Seventy percent of the traffic crash fatalities of Iran happen on rural roads, and a significant proportion of the rural roads network of this country is constituted of the main two-lane, two-way roads. The purpose of this study is to identify the most important factors which affect injury severity of drivers involved in traffic crashes on these roads, so that by eliminating or controlling such factors an overall safety improvement can be accomplished. Using the Classification and Regression Tree (CART), one of the powerful data mining tools, the crash data pertaining to the last three years (2006-2008) were analyzed. The variable selection procedure was carried out on the basis of Variable Importance Measure (VIM) which is one of the CART method outputs. The results revealed that not using the seat belt, improper overtaking and speeding are the most important factors associated with injury severity. KEYWORDS: injury severity; traffic safety; data mining; Classification and Regression Trees (CART); Variable Importance Measure (VIM)
Highlights
Iran is one of the countries with a high rate of traffic crash fatalities and injuries
Seventy percent of the traffic crash fatalities of Iran happen on rural roads, and a significant proportion of the rural roads network of this country is constituted of the main twolane, two-way roads
This research reveals that for two-lane two-way rural roads, improper overtaking and speeding are the serious causes of increasing injury severity, and since overtaking takes place by using the opposite lane, it results in more severe injuries and more lives lost
Summary
Iran is one of the countries with a high rate of traffic crash fatalities and injuries. Over the last three years, traffic crashes in Iran resulted in 24,000 people (i.e. 3 persons per hour) on the average killed and around 240,000 injured annually [1]. Understanding the circumstances under which the drivers and passengers are more likely to be killed or more severely injured in an automobile crash is of special concern to researchers in traffic safety. Identification of these factors can help improve the overall driving safety situation, by preventing accidents and by reducing their severity. More than 90 percent of passenger carriage in Iran is carried out by road transportation mode [2], and a significant proportion of the rural roads network of Iran consists of two-lane, two-way roads
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