Road safety of passing maneuvers: A bivariate extreme value theory approach under non-stationary conditions

Publication date: Available online 23 October 2019Source: Accident Analysis & PreventionAuthor(s): Joana Cavadas, Carlos Lima Azevedo, Haneen Farah, Ana FerreiraAbstractObserved accidents have been the main resource for road safety analysis over the past decades. Although such reliance seems quite straightforward, the rare nature of these events has made safety difficult to assess, especially for new and innovative traffic treatments. Surrogate measures of safety have allowed to step away from traditional safety performance functions and analyze safety performance without relying on accident records. In recent years, the use of extreme value theory (EV) models in combination with surrogate safety measures to estimate accident probabilities has gained popularity within the safety community.In this paper we extend existing efforts on EV for accident probability estimation for two dependent surrogate measures. Using detailed trajectory data from a driving simulator, we model the joint probability of head-on and rear-end collisions in passing maneuvers. We apply the Block Maxima method and estimate several extremal univariate and bivariate models, including the logistic copula. In our estimation we account for driver specific characteristics and road infrastructure variables. We show that accounting for these factors improve the head-on and rear-end collision probabilities estimation. This work highlights the importance of considering driver and road heterogeneity in evaluating r...
Source: Accident Analysis and Prevention - Category: Accident Prevention Source Type: research