Analysing truck harsh braking incidents to study roundabout accident risk

Abstract

In order to reduce accident risk, highway authorities prioritise maintenance budgets partly based upon previous accident history. However, as accident rates have continued to fall, this approach has become problematic as accident ‘black spots’ have been treated and the number of accidents at any individual site has fallen, making previous accident history a less reliable indicator of future accident risk. Another way of identifying sites of higher accident risk might be to identify near-miss accidents (where an accident nearly happened but was avoided). The principal aim of this paper is to analyze potentially unsafe truck driving conditions from counts of Harsh Braking Incidents (HBIs) at roundabouts and compare the results to similar, previous studies of accident numbers at the same sites, to explore if HBIs can be studied as a surrogate for accidents. This is achieved by processing truck telematics data with geo-referenced incidents of harsh braking. Models are then developed to characterise the relationships between truck HBIs and geometric and traffic variables. These HBIs are likely to occur more often than accidents and may, therefore, be useful in identifying sites with high accident risk. Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that HBIs are influenced by traffic and geometric variables in a similar way to accidents; therefore they may be useful in considering accident risk at roundabouts. They are a source of higher volumes of data than accidents, which is important in considering changes or trends in accident risk over time. The results showed that random-parameters count data models provide better goodness of fit compared to fixed-parameters models and more variables were found to be significant, giving a better prediction of events.