Did Operating Speeds During COVID-19 Result in More Fatal and Injury Crashes on Urban Freeways?

Abstract

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the transportation arena included less traffic, higher speeds, and higher fatal and injury crash frequencies. Many news media reported on speeding and its impact. However, the majority of these reporting are based on partial or incomplete information. The current study aims to understand the association between speed and crash on the freeways of Dallas (Texas) by collecting data from the National Performance Management Research Dataset, the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT’s) roadway inventory, and TxDOT’s crash database for 2018–2020. The results show decreasing traffic volume, increasing average operating speed, and increasing fatal and severe crash frequencies per 100 million vehicle miles traveled during 2020 (April–November). This study developed 8-month- and daily-level safety prediction models for fatal and injury crashes. The 8-month-level dataset contains speed measures as an aggregate for the 8-month period. The daily-level database includes operating speeds and fatal and injury crashes at the daily level where segments experiencing fatal and injury crashes were temporally matched with the same segment with the same day of the week and with no fatal and injury crash occurrences. For the 8-month models, average operating speed and speed variability are positively associated with fatal and injury crash frequencies during the COVID period. This association was also found for daily-level models. The findings of this study can help transportation agencies in developing strategies (for example, posted speed limit reconsideration, additional enforcement at specific locations) for crash reduction.