Abstract
Truck-related crashes result in tremendous lives and property loss and become a serious safety issue in China. The goal of this article is to identify the influential factors for severity of truck-related crashes using data from Jingjintang freeways in China and to design an ordered probit model to explore their relationship. Records including crashes, traffic flow attributes, and geometric design features ranging from 2009 to 2012 were collected from Jingjintang freeway. Crashes are divided into three severity levels: slight injury, injury, and fatal injury. The injury crashes is ranking the first place occupying 64.37%. Truck-related crashes are likely to occur when truck percentage is around 20% and 80%. The speed of traffic flow decreases with the more appearance of trucks. The ordered probit model is developed to estimate the impacts of influential factors on injury severity of truck-related crashes. Marginal effects for each level of injury severity are calculated. The results reveal that truck-involving crashes are highly sensitive to factors such as time of day, truck percentage, average slope, operating speed, speed difference, and exposure variable. The average slope of road segment and speed gaps has the greatest impact on all severity levels of crashes.
Highlights
There are currently 117,000 km freeways in China and over 50,000 people die of accidents per year
According to crash statistics from Public Security Administration Bureau, truck-related crashes resulted in 21.1% of crashes, 36.45% of the total crash fatalities in 2016.1 Trucks have poorer operating capabilities than passenger cars, in acceleration, deceleration, turning, and the ability to maintain speed on upgrades, longer stopping distances from a given speed
The speed gap dropped below 20 km/h when the mixture rate goes up to 80%, which indicates that more trucks in traffic flow leads to a uniform speed
Summary
There are currently 117,000 km freeways in China and over 50,000 people die of accidents per year. Sizes, and operating abilities may create serious safety problem for traffic flow. That trucks mix in traffic flow causes speed gaps between trucks and passenger cars. These features in combination with larger weight definitely increase the severity of crashes. Few previous studies only focused on factors contributing to severity of truck crashes in China. It is critical to study exclusively on truck-related crashes and explore relationship between injury severity and influential factors. The findings would help to provide countermeasure to prevent truck-involving crashes and mitigate the severity of truck-related crashes on freeways in China.
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