A time-series analysis of motorway collisions in England considering road infrastructure, socio-demographics, traffic and weather characteristics

Publication date: Available online 11 February 2016 Source:Journal of Transport & Health Author(s): Paraskevi Michalaki, Mohammed Quddus, David Pitfield, Andrew Huetson Traffic injuries on motorways are a public health problem worldwide. Collisions on motorways represent a high injury rate in comparison to the entire national network. Furthermore, collisions that occur on the hard–shoulder are even more severe than those that happen on the main carriageway. The purpose of this paper is to explore motorway safety through the identification of patterns in the sequence of monthly hard–shoulder and main carriageway collisions separately over a long period of time (1993–2011) by using reported collision data from British motorways. In order to examine the trends of hard–shoulder and motorway collisions over the same period, a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model is developed; this allows the inclusion of two time-series in the same model and the examination of the effect of one series on the other and vice-versa. Exogenous variables are also added in order to explore the long-term factors that might affect the occurrence of collisions. The factors considered are related to the infrastructure (e.g. length of motorways), socio-demographics (e.g. percentage of young drivers), traffic (e.g. percentage of vehicle-miles travelled by Heavy Goods Vehicles) and weather (e.g. precipitation). The results suggest different patterns in the sequences in terms of the lin...
Source: Journal of Transport and Health - Category: Occupational Health Source Type: research