Insights into Factors Affecting Traffic Accident Severity of Novice and Experienced Drivers: A Machine Learning Approach

Traffic accidents have significant financial and social impacts. Reducing the losses caused by traffic accidents has always been one of the most important issues. This paper presents an effort to investigate the factors affecting the accident severity of drivers with different driving experience. Special focus was placed on the combined effect of driving experience and age. Based on our dataset (traffic accidents that occurred between 2005 and 2021 in Shaanxi, China), CatBoost model was applied to deal with categorical feature, and SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations) model was used to interpret the output. Results show that accident cause, age, visibility, light condition, season, road alignment, and terrain are the key factors affecting accident severity for both novice and experienced drivers. Age has the opposite impact on fatal accident for novice and experienced drivers. Novice drivers younger than 30 or older than 55 are prone to suffer fatal accident, but for experienced drivers, the risk of fatal accident decreases when they are young and increases when they are old. These findings fill the research gap of the combined effect of driving experience and age on accident severity. Meanwhile, it can provide useful insights for practitioners to improve traffic safety for novice and experienced drivers.

Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Technologies for Traffic Accident Data Analysis in Botswana

Road traffic accidents are a serious problem for the nation of Botswana. A large amount of money is used to compensate those who are affected by road accidents. Traffic accidents are one of the major causes of Deaths in Botswana. It is important for relevant organizations to have a reliable source of data for accurate evaluation of traffic accidents. Similarly, data on vehicle registration must be transformed and be readily available to assist managerial decision makers. In this article, we deploy a Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehouse (DW) solution in an attempt to assist the relevant departments in their road traffic accidents and vehicle registration evaluation. In Our evaluation of the traffic accidents our findings suggest that across accident severity, Damage Only accidents had the most interesting recent trend with a 11.93% decrease in the last 3 years on record. Count of Accident Severity for Damage Only accidents dropped from 13,491 to 11,881 between 2018 and 2020 whilst Minor accidents experienced the longest period of growth. Most accidents take place in rural locations and more accidents take place during the weekend. At 28,439, Sunday had the highest number of accidents and was 47.59% higher than Wednesday, which had the lowest count of accidents at 19,269. The results for vehicle registration reveal that the number of vehicle registration decreased for the last 3 years on record. The number of vehicles registered dropped from 65535 to 24457 during its steepest decline between 2019 and 2021.

ASI Based Identification and Prioritization of Accident Black Spot

The number of motor vehicles on road increased spectacularly which causing major social and transportation problems such as death and economic losses. Eradication of accident blackspots is a crucial part of the road safety approach. So, this issue informed the quest to study and identify the accidental black spot in the context of NH 6. The stretch of 35 km on NH 6 near Pune was considered to identify the black spot. Accident blackspot locations were distinguished through the accident severity index (ASI) method by employing two years of accident data. These identified black spots were prioritized based on their final severity index score. The two most vulnerable black spots out of nine were selected for further analysis and countermeasure process. Conclusively, the accident severity-based framework can effectively correlate the nature of the accident with the type of casualty to provide detailed and accurate black spot location. Keywords: Black Spots, Accident Severity Index (ASI), Black Spot Prioritization, Traffic Volume, Highway, Countermeasures.

The effect of OHS costs on accident severity rate in the construction industry

Due to its dynamic nature, rapid technology change, uneducated employees, harsh working conditions, many work accidents, and heavy consequences of accidents, occupational health and safety (OHS) practices are essential in the construction industry. However, occupational Health and Safety measures in the construction industry come with additional costs. Therefore, employers who have to bear a cost to take OHS measures may consider OHS costs unnecessary without considering the costs they will bear after work accidents and occupational diseases. This research aims to estimate the optimal costs of OHS budgets to reduce the number of accidents with lost time injury and whether the carried costs for occupational health and safety in the construction industry impact the lost time injuries. Therefore, OHS costs in the construction industry are grouped into eight categories: fire, work equipment, electricity, health, personal protective equipment, general equipment, training and occupational health and safety service costs. This research is based on the standard unit costs set for the 8 OHS criteria required by the OHS laws, accident severity rates and actual unit costs that the projects have carried for five years for the construction of 15 buildings with 220.000 m2- 500.000 m2 indoor space which is located in Istanbul Turkey, started in 2013 and completed in 2017. Since the research was conducted before January 1, 2020, there is no requirement for an ethics committee permission document. According to the research results, as the costs of occupational health and safety services, fire and training increased, accident severity rates has decreased. However, the impact of other variables on accident severity rates was not statistically significant. Thus, construction enterprises that want to decrease the accident severity rates in their projects need to emphasise occupational health and safety services, fire, and training criteria.