Investigating exposure of the population to crash injury using a spatiotemporal analysis: A case study in Florida

Abstract

Over the years, as the roadway networks have been developing gradually to improve transportation accessibility to various facilities, the probability of traffic crash occurrences has also increased consequently. With an increasing transportation demand, the traffic safety needs to be improved in order to reduce the crash rates and the exposure of the population to crash-prone regions. This paper aims to conduct a spatiotemporal analysis to quantify the exposure of population to crash-prone locations focusing on different age groups, and to statistically analyze the decision-making process for possible improvement. For this purpose, first, the crash-prone locations for different population age groups and various time intervals of a day were identified by using a geographic information system (GIS) hotspot analysis. This was followed by an Origin-Destination (OD) analysis applied on a case study in Tampa Bay region (Florida, District 7) to calculate the roadway network-based travel times between census blocks centroids (origins) and crash hotspot locations (destinations) along the least-cost roadways. Later, the results were utilized in an exceedance probability analysis to simplify the decision-making process for improvement. The results showed that the time-based analysis provides more accurate and detailed information than the distance-based analysis. The Weighted Hotspot Exposure Measure parameter introduced for statistical analysis showed that the senior age group (over 65 years old) are more exposed to the risk of being injured in a crash compared to other age groups.