Exploring the main and interaction effects of traffic flow characteristics, roadway design and weather conditions on the real-time crash risk for urban roads with mixed logit model

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the main and interaction effects of contributing factors from multiple risk sources (i.e. traffic flow characteristics, roadway design and weather conditions) on the real-time crash risk for urban roads. A mixed logit model is used to characterise heterogeneity induced by unobservable factors, and result shows that the mixed logit model achieves better goodness-of-fit than the binary logit model. It is found that the multiple risk sources such as roadway design (i.e. length of road segment, road hierarchy), traffic flow characteristics (i.e. average speed, average travel time, congestion level), and weather conditions (i.e. wind speed) have significant effects on the real-time crash risk. Moreover, interactions between the multiple risk sources such as roadway design and traffic flow characteristics (i.e. SD of speed and length of road segment, road hierarchy and average travel time), traffic flow characteristics and weather conditions (i.e. average travel time, temperature and wind speed), and roadway design and weather conditions (i.e. length of road segment and wind speed) are found to be significantly correlated to the real-time crash risk. Such findings can be potentially used for the development of real-time management measures that could mitigate the high-risk situations of urban roads.