Macroscopic Spatial Analysis of the Impact of Socioeconomic, Land Use and Mobility Factors on the Frequency of Traffic Accidents in Bogotá

Abstract

The urban structure of a city, defined by its inhabitants, daily movements, and land use, has become an environmental factor of interest that is related to traffic accidents. Traditionally, macro modeling is usually implemented using spatial econometric methods; however, techniques such as support vector regression have proven to be efficient in identifying the relationships between factors at the zonal level and the frequency associated with these events when considering the autocorrelation between spatial units. As a result of this, the main objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of socioeconomical, land use, and mobility variables on the frequency of traffic accidents through the analysis of area data using spatial and vector support regression models. The spatial weighting matrix term was incorporated into the support vector regression models to compare the results against those that ignore it. The urban land of Bogotá, disaggregated into the territorial units of mobility analysis, was delimited as a study area. Two response variables were used: the traffic accidents index on the road perimeter and the traffic accidents index with deaths on the road perimeter, to analyze the total number of traffic accidents and the deaths caused by them. The results indicated that the rate of trips per person by taxi and motorcycle had the greatest impact on the increase in total accidents and deaths caused by them. Support vector regression models that incorporate the spatial structure allowed the modeling of the spatial dependency between spatial units with a better fit than the spatial regression models.