The Effects of Land Use, Design and Environment on Traffic Fatalities

Abstract

Developing statistics methods to distinguish significant factors associated with roadways is one of the most feasible accesses to understand the nature of traffic accidents. In this study, zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model was developed to allow for overdispersion and excess zeros, as well as the factors of land use, design and environment to examine the effects. The statistical tests show that ZINB model is preferred to zero-inflated Poisson and negative binomial models due to its ability to describe crash counts associated with severe injuries and fatalities more effectively. The results show that fatalities are positively associated with segment length, surface width, land use variables and rainfall. For example, an increase of one inch rainfall will result in an increase of 0.02% in fatalities. Interestingly, distances to hospitals yield positive impact, which suggests that longer distances lead to higher fatalities, presumably due to time lost in transporting crash victims to hospitals.