Abstract
With the increasing demand of hazardous material (Hazmat), traffic accidents occurred frequently during Hazmat transportation, which had caused widespread concern in communities. Therefore, a good understanding of Hazmat transportation accident characteristics and contributing factors is of practical importance. In this study, 1721 Hazmat accidents that have occurred during road transportation for the period 2014–2017 in China were examined, and a random-parameters ordered probit model was established to explore the influence of contributing factors on the severity of accidents by accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in the data. Both the injuries and the number of people evacuated were considered as the indicator of accident severity and investigated, respectively. Results show that higher injury severity is likely to be associated with type of Hazmat (compressed gas, explosive, and poison), misoperation, driver fatigue, speeding, tunnel, slope, county road, dry road surface, winter, dark, more than two vehicles, rear end crash, and explosion. As for the correlation between risk factors and the severity of evacuation, type of Hazmat (compressed gas, explosive, and poison), quantity of Hazmat (10–39 t), misoperation, county road, dry road surface, weekdays, dusk, explosion significantly contribute to increasing the severity of evacuation of Hazmat accidents.
Highlights
With the continuous improvement of industrialization, the demand of Hazardous material (Hazmat) has been increasing
The purpose of this study is to investigate risk factors that contribute to the severity of Hazmat transportation accidents
This paper focused on the Hazmat accidents during road transport, and accidents that occurred during loading, unloading, storage, and maintenance were excluded
Summary
With the continuous improvement of industrialization, the demand of Hazardous material (Hazmat) has been increasing. Road transportation is one of the main ways of Hazmat transportation. According to the Commodity Flow Survey, in 2012, approximately 2.6 billion tons of Hazmat was moved on the U.S transportation network by all modes. HAZMATs by tonnage [1]. By the end of 2017, approximately 1.1 billion tons of HAZMAT was transported by trucks in China, which accounted for nearly 70% of total Hazmat by all the modes. Hazardous materials in Brazil were mainly transported by road, accounting for 63% of total Hazmat transportation [2]. To ensure safety of Hazmat transportation, the European Agreement
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