Examining the factors affecting the severity of run-off-road crashes in Abu Dhabi

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Shawky ◽  
Hany M. Hassan ◽  
Atef M. Garib ◽  
Hussain A. Al-Harthei

Recently, the severity of injuries resulting from traffic crashes has been extensively investigated in numerous studies. However, the number of studies that addressed the severity of the run-off-road (ROR) crashes is relatively low. In the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (AD), approximately 22% of the total serious crashes and fatalities that occurred from 2007 to 2013 were ROR crashes. Despite these facts and the uniqueness of the composition of licensed drivers in AD (approximately 87% of them are non-Emiratis), the factors affecting the occurrence and severity of ROR crashes in AD have not been explicitly addressed in any prior studies. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the characteristics of at-fault drivers involved in ROR crashes in AD, the nature and main causes of those crashes. In this regard, conditional distribution and two-way contingency tables were developed. In addition, this study aims to identify and quantify the factors affecting the severity of ROR crashes such as driver, road, vehicle and environment factors. To achieve this goal, ordered probit model approach was employed. Crash data for a total of 3819 ROR crashes that occurred in AD were employed in the analysis. The results indicated that driver factors (carelessness, speeding, and nationality), vehicle characteristics (vehicle type), and road and environment factors (road type, crash location and road surface condition) were the significant factors influencing the severity of ROR crashes in AD. Countermeasures to improve traffic safety and reduce numbers and severity of ROR crashes in AD were discussed.

2018 ◽  
Vol 250 ◽  
pp. 02002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nordiana Mashros ◽  
SittiAsmah Hassan ◽  
Yaacob Haryati ◽  
Mohd Shahrir Amin Ahmad ◽  
Ismail Samat ◽  
...  

Understanding and prioritising crash contributing factors is important for improving traffic safety on the expressway. This paper aims to identify the possible contributory factors that were based on findings obtained from crash data at Senai-Desaru Expressway (SDE), which is the main connector between the western and eastern parts of Johor, Malaysia. Using reported accident data, the mishaps that had occurred along the 77.2 km road were used to identify crash patterns and their possible related segment conditions. The Average Crash Frequency and Equivalent Property Damage Only Average Crash Frequency Methods had been used to identify and rank accident-prone road segments as well as to propose for appropriate simple and inexpensive countermeasures. The results show that the dominant crash type along the road stretches of SDE had consisted of run-off-road collision and property damage only crashes. All types of accidents were more likely to occur during daytime. Out of the 154 segments, the 4 most accident-prone road segments had been determined and analysed. The results obtained from the analyses suggest that accident types are necessary for identifying the possible causes of accidents and the appropriate strategies for countermeasures. Therefore, this accident analysis could be helpful to relevant authorities in reducing the number of road accidents and the level of accident severity along the SDE.


Author(s):  
Hany M. Hassan ◽  
Nuha M. Albusaeedi ◽  
Atef M. Garib ◽  
Hussain A. Al-Harthei

Traffic crashes involving heavy trucks long have been a major concern in the field of traffic safety because of their great effect on accident severity. The emirate of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, features a unique situation: several roads designed mainly for truck movement. Even though those roads were constructed more than 10 years ago to decrease the severity of truck-related crashes, no prior studies have examined their effects on traffic safety improvements. The goals of this study were to understand better the nature, characteristics, and causes of heavy truck crashes occurring in Abu Dhabi; to identify the factors associated with crash severities; and to examine the probability of truck crashes involving fatalities on truck roads versus on mixed-vehicle roads. Data were analyzed from a sample of 1,426 heavy truck–related crashes with reported fatalities or injuries that occurred in Abu Dhabi between 2007 and 2013. First, conditional distributions, two-way analysis, and odds ratios were performed. Second, ordered probit and structural equation models were developed. Results indicated that the likelihood of truck crashes involving fatalities was 35% higher on truck roads than on mixed-vehicle roads. In addition, findings showed that human error, driver education, location, road type, and road speed variables were significant in affecting the severity of heavy truck– related crashes. Finally, practical suggestions on how to reduce the number of heavy truck–related crashes in Abu Dhabi are presented and discussed.


Author(s):  
Beau Burdett ◽  
Andrea R. Bill ◽  
David A. Noyce

Roundabouts reduce fatal and injury crashes at intersections when converted from other intersection control types. In Wisconsin, roundabouts have been linked to a 38% decrease in fatal and injury crashes. Part of this reduction can be attributed to crash types that result in the mitigation of more serious injuries. However, the reduction comes at a cost because other crash types, such as single-vehicle collisions, may increase. Six years of crash data on 53 roundabouts in Wisconsin were examined for crash causes and geometric characteristics that affected single-vehicle crashes. Weather and impaired driving, particularly by younger drivers, were primary causes for more than half of all single-vehicle crashes at the study roundabouts. Younger drivers (18 to 24 years of age) were involved in a significantly higher proportion of single-vehicle crashes than the total proportion of licensed drivers in that age group. Younger drivers were involved in approximately one-third of all crashes that involved impaired driving and in two-thirds of all speed-related single-vehicle crashes. A negative binomial model was constructed to estimate run-off-road crashes at approaches. It was found that roundabouts with higher approach speeds and higher traffic volumes experienced more run-off-road crashes. Landscaped central islands experienced significantly lower frequencies of run-off-road crashes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 80 (ET.2020) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Malaya Mohanty

Traffic safety is an integral part of transportation engineering. In developing countries, its importance is even more. Additionally, at uncontrolled median openings, the severity of road crashes increase many fold. Conventionally, road crash data were used to analyse safety. However, in developing countries, the accuracy of this data is highly questionable. Therefore, in this study, a new technique in addition to post encroachment time (PET), which is a surrogate safety measure is used to predict the severity of probable road crashes at median openings. After the extraction of PET values from field data, they have been compared with the minimum braking times obtained from calculation of minimum stopping sight distance. The comparison shows that while the number of road crashes may be less at lower traffic volume levels, however the severity of those crashes is much higher as compared to the road crashes occurring at high traffic volumes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Ying Chen ◽  
Zhongxiang Huang

Inclement weather affects traffic safety in various ways. Crashes on rainy days not only cause fatalities and injuries but also significantly increase travel time. Accurately predicting crash risk under inclement weather conditions is helpful and informative to both roadway agencies and roadway users. Safety researchers have proposed various analytic methods to predict crashes. However, most of them require complete roadway inventory, traffic, and crash data. Data incompleteness is a challenge in many developing countries. It is common that safety researchers only have access to data on sites where a crash has occurred (i.e., zero-truncated data). The conventional crash models are not applicable to zero-truncated safety data. This paper proposes a finite-mixture zero-truncated negative binomial (FMZTNB) model structure. The model is applied to three-year wet-road crash data on 395 divided roadway segments (total 586 km), and the parameters are estimated using the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. Comparison indicates that the proposed FMZTNB model has better fitting performance and is more accurate in predicting the number of wet-road crashes. The model is capable of capturing the heterogeneity within the sample crash data. In addition, lane width showed mixed effects in different components on wet-road crashes, which are not observed in conventional modeling approaches. Practitioners are encouraged to consider the finite-mixture zero-truncated modeling approach when complete safety dataset is not available.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Fady M. A. Hassouna ◽  
Khaled Al-Sahili

Road crashes are problems facing the transportation sector. Crash data in many countries are available only for the past 10 to 20 years, which makes it difficult to determine whether the data are sufficient to establish reasonable and accurate prediction rates. In this study, the effect of sample size (number of years used to develop a prediction model) on the crash prediction accuracy using Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) method was investigated using crash data for years 1971–2015. Based on the availability of annual crash records, road crash data for four selected countries (Denmark, Turkey, Germany, and Israel) were used to develop the crash prediction models based on different sample sizes (45, 35, 25, and 15 years). Then, crash data for 2016 and 2017 were used to verify the accuracy of the developed models. Furthermore, crash data for Palestine were used to test the validity of the results. The used data included fatality, injury, and property damage crashes. The results showed similar trends in the models’ prediction accuracy for all four countries when predicting road crashes for year 2016. Decreasing the sample sizes led to less prediction accuracy up to a sample size of 25; then, the accuracy increased for the 15-year sample size. Whereas there was no specific trend in the prediction accuracy for year 2017, a higher range of prediction error was also obtained. It is concluded that the prediction accuracy would vary based on the varying socioeconomic, traffic safety programs and development conditions of the country over the study years. For countries with steady and stable conditions, modeling using larger sample sizes would yield higher accuracy models with higher prediction capabilities. As for countries with less steady and stable conditions, modeling using smaller sample sizes (15 years, for example) would lead to high accuracy models with good prediction capabilities. Therefore, it is recommended that the socioeconomic and traffic safety program status of the country is considered before selecting the practical minimum sample size that would give an acceptable prediction accuracy, therefore saving efforts and time spent in collecting data (more is not always better). Moreover, based on the data analysis results, long-term ARIMA prediction models should be used with caution.


Author(s):  
Tianpei Tang ◽  
Senlai Zhu ◽  
Yuntao Guo ◽  
Xizhao Zhou ◽  
Yang Cao

Evaluating the safety risk of rural roadsides is critical for achieving reasonable allocation of a limited budget and avoiding excessive installation of safety facilities. To assess the safety risk of rural roadsides when the crash data are unavailable or missing, this study proposed a Bayesian Network (BN) method that uses the experts’ judgments on the conditional probability of different safety risk factors to evaluate the safety risk of rural roadsides. Eight factors were considered, including seven factors identified in the literature and a new factor named access point density. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a case study was conducted using 19.42 km long road networks in the rural area of Nantong, China. By comparing the results of the proposed method and run-off-road (ROR) crash data from 2015–2016 in the study area, the road segments with higher safety risk levels identified by the proposed method were found to be statistically significantly correlated with higher crash severity based on the crash data. In addition, by comparing the respective results evaluated by eight factors and seven factors (a new factor removed), we also found that access point density significantly contributed to the safety risk of rural roadsides. These results show that the proposed method can be considered as a low-cost solution to evaluating the safety risk of rural roadsides with relatively high accuracy, especially for areas with large rural road networks and incomplete ROR crash data due to budget limitation, human errors, negligence, or inconsistent crash recordings.


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