Developing a New Spatial Unit for Macroscopic Safety Evaluation Based on Traffic Density Homogeneity

Macrolevel crash modeling has been extensively applied to investigate the safety effects of demographic, socioeconomic, and land use factors, in order to add safety knowledge into traffic planning and policy-making. In recent years, with the increasing attention to regional traffic management and control, the safety effects of macrolevel traffic flow parameters may also be of interest, in order to provide useful safety knowledge for regional traffic operation. In this paper, a new spatial unit was developed using a recursive half-cut partitioning procedure based on a normalized cut (NC) minimization method and traffic density homogeneity. Two Bayesian lognormal models with different conditional autoregressive (CAR) priors were applied to examine the safety effects of traffic flow characteristics at the NC level. It was found that safety effects of traffic flow exist at such macrolevel, indicating the necessity of considering safety for regional traffic control and management. Furthermore, traffic flow effects were also examined for another two spatial units: Traffic Analysis Zone (TAZ) and Census Tract (CT). It was found that ecological fallacy and atomic fallacy could exist without considering traffic flow parameters at those planning-based levels. In general, safety needs to be considered for regional traffic operation and the effects of traffic flow need to be considered for spatial crash modeling at various spatial levels.