Heinrich’s Law for Traffic Incidents – Using the Digital Tachograph Data to Identify Traffic Accident Hotspots

Abstract

Heinrich’s Law indicates an empirical ratio between serious accidents, minor accidents and near misses in industrial sites, but has not been discussed in the context of road traffic accidents. Digital tachographs (DTG), a type of IoT device collecting spatiotemporal big data of vehicle trajectories, allow0 for examining a linkage between abnormal driving behaviours and the prevalence of road traffic incidents. According to the Traffic Safety Act implemented in 2011, DTG has been mandatorily pre-installed on most commercial vehicles in South Korea. The data have been analysed to evaluate the data processing method or promote eco-driving or safe driving, but only a few studies have examined an association between driving behaviours and actual traffic accidents using the limited data. We obtained 7,785,124 DTG sensing records from 1,523 commercial taxis driving within the city limits of Seoul at least once in 2013 and integrated them with 57,139 traffic accident cases during the same period. Using the integrated GIS database, we performed a grid-based spatiotemporal mapping and analysis to calculate a ratio among abnormal driving events, minor and major traffic accidents by road type. The findings suggest a potential for enhancing road safety by monitoring and controlling abnormal driving patterns as a precursor for accidents.