Abstract
Understanding the factors that contribute to traffic crashes can help provide a fundamental basis to plan and develop appropriate countermeasures for road safety issues emerging in particular on two-lane rural roads. However, most of the studies have focused on urban roadways and freeway systems, and few studies have investigated the issue of heterogeneity on two-lane rural roads. The purpose of this study is to uncover the risk factors influencing crash severity on two-lane rural roads in China. A sample of 1490 traffic crashes occurring on two-lane rural roads between 2012 and 2017 was collected from the Mouding County Highway Bureau in Yunnan, China. A random-parameter ordered probit model was estimated using these data to capture underlying unobserved characteristics in personal traits, vehicle attributes, roadway conditions, environmental factors, and crash attribute. To better understand the effect of critical factors on crash severity outcome probability, an elasticity analysis was then introduced. The results show that six factors such as driver’s attribution, illegal driving behaviour, access segment, day of week, vehicle type, and crash form have a significant impact on the injury severity, and the impacts of driving behaviours, access segment, and vehicle-fixed object crashes had significant variation across observations. Besides, the correlations between critical factors and the probability of serious injury sustained in traffic crashes are identified and discussed. The local driver indicator has more positive impact on the crash severity than nonlocal driver, and nonaccess segment appears a higher probability of serious or vicious collisions. It is worth mentioning that motorcycle-involved crashes do show an obvious correlation with crash injury severity. As for crash forms, vehicle-vehicle crashes are more likely to lead to severe crash injury. Besides, high-risk driving behaviour (e.g., fatigue driving, speeding, and converse driving), weekends, and holidays are found to have significant contribution to increasing the probability of traffic crash injuries and fatalities on two-lane rural roads.
Highlights
Two-lane roads constitute a major portion of the rural road system in most countries of the world
This study collected data from crashes, linear design, environment, and traffic flow, and datasets are standardized for processing, including data extraction, processing, coding, and classification to establish a basic database of two-lane rural roads. en, after the parallel line hypothesis test and the argument variable multilinear test are carried out, a variable impact analysis was conducted using the random-parameter ordered probit model to investigate the effects of the explanatory variables on injury severity. ese findings further provide insights for a better understanding of crash severity on two-lane rural roads
To test the overall model fit, used the chi-square distribution and Akaike information criterion (AIC), which are calculated using equations (7) and (8), where the likelihood ratio tests are conducted to statistically assess if crash severity models are significantly different across the fixed-parameter model and the randomparameter model: χ2 2LL βrandom − LL βfixed, (7)
Summary
Two-lane roads constitute a major portion of the rural road system in most countries of the world. In China, 114,287 traffic crashes occurring on two-lane rural roads resulted in nearly 71% of the total fatalities on highways in 2013 [1]. In Europe, approximately 60% of road accident fatalities occur on two-lane rural roads [2]. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that rural areas held only 19% of the total U.S population but induced 48% of fatal traffic crashes and 49% of traffic fatalities in 2015 [3]. Ere is a need to investigate why higher proportions of fatal and severe injuries are occurring on two-lane rural roads to develop effective countermeasures for improving traffic safety in rural areas. Two-lane rural road is the key road connecting country town and counties, and two-lane rural highway is a passage between counties. Two-lane rural road is the key road connecting country town and counties, and two-lane rural highway is a passage between counties. e most
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