Investigating factors affecting bus/minibus accident severity in a developing country for different subgroup datasets characterised by time, pavement, and light conditions

This study seeks to investigate the variations in the effect of contributing factors on the severity of bus/minibus accidents in Ghana across various combinations of pavement and light conditions and to identify the exact effects of weekdays and weekends on severity outcomes using a random parameter ordered logit model with heterogeneity in the means to account for unobserved heterogeneity in the police-reported data. Preliminary analysis demonstrated that accident-risk factors used in the models were temporally unstable, warranting the division of the data into both weekend and weekday time-periods. A wide variety of factors such as sideswipes, median presence, merging, and overtaking had significantly varying effects on bus/minibus accident severities under different combinations of pavement and light conditions for both weekdays and weekends. Insights drawn from this study, together with the policy recommendations provided, can be employed by engineers and policymakers to improve traffic safety in developing nations.PMID:34216855 | DOI:10.1016/j.aap.2021.106268
Source: Accident; Analysis and Prevention. - Category: Accident Prevention Authors: Source Type: research