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Identifying areas of high risk for collisions: A Canda-wide study of grade crossing safety

Identifying areas of high risk for collisions: A Canda-wide study of grade crossing safety
Identifying areas of high risk for collisions: A Canda-wide study of grade crossing safety

Ranking sites and identifying high-crash risk locations based on various safety performance measures (e.g. expected crash frequency) are among the key tasks of the safety management program, enabling an effective allocation of funds for safety improvement projects. While several studies have discussed the issues relating to the hotspot identification process at a micro-level (e.g., intersections or highway segments), less attention is given to the macro-level hotspot identification issue: how to identify areas or regions with the highest risk of crashes. In this research, we introduce a Bayesian multilevel (hierarchical) model for estimating the regional differences while controlling for other important site attributes. The proposed method is illustrated using a case study on railway grade crossings in Canada. While accommodating the spatial dependencies of crash risk, our method allows a fair comparison of different regions by adjusting for the effect of covariates such as traffic exposure. In particular, we compute pairwise probabilities of crash risk for each province in Canada compared to all others. We are therefore able to draw inferences about regional safety performances under similar circumstances. Our findings indicate the need for further investigation to identify the possible reasons for inter-region variations in grade crossing safety across Canada. Our approach could be useful to guide safety policy development and resource allocation.

high-crash zones, multilevel modelling, risk-adjusted ranking, zonal-level ranking
640-644
IEEE
Heydari, Shahram
0d12a583-a4e8-4888-9e51-a50d312be1e9
Fu, Liping
5a8cfcc4-d76e-4456-b4e0-7877de2a0eb1
Thakali, Lalita
7fd52523-5652-4103-bb17-ccfd74a50adc
Joseph, Lawrence
495a60cb-4dff-4d23-b2d3-2ac9c0802dd2
Heydari, Shahram
0d12a583-a4e8-4888-9e51-a50d312be1e9
Fu, Liping
5a8cfcc4-d76e-4456-b4e0-7877de2a0eb1
Thakali, Lalita
7fd52523-5652-4103-bb17-ccfd74a50adc
Joseph, Lawrence
495a60cb-4dff-4d23-b2d3-2ac9c0802dd2

Heydari, Shahram, Fu, Liping, Thakali, Lalita and Joseph, Lawrence (2017) Identifying areas of high risk for collisions: A Canda-wide study of grade crossing safety. In 2017 4th International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety, ICTIS 2017 - Proceedings. IEEE. pp. 640-644 . (doi:10.1109/ICTIS.2017.8047834).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Ranking sites and identifying high-crash risk locations based on various safety performance measures (e.g. expected crash frequency) are among the key tasks of the safety management program, enabling an effective allocation of funds for safety improvement projects. While several studies have discussed the issues relating to the hotspot identification process at a micro-level (e.g., intersections or highway segments), less attention is given to the macro-level hotspot identification issue: how to identify areas or regions with the highest risk of crashes. In this research, we introduce a Bayesian multilevel (hierarchical) model for estimating the regional differences while controlling for other important site attributes. The proposed method is illustrated using a case study on railway grade crossings in Canada. While accommodating the spatial dependencies of crash risk, our method allows a fair comparison of different regions by adjusting for the effect of covariates such as traffic exposure. In particular, we compute pairwise probabilities of crash risk for each province in Canada compared to all others. We are therefore able to draw inferences about regional safety performances under similar circumstances. Our findings indicate the need for further investigation to identify the possible reasons for inter-region variations in grade crossing safety across Canada. Our approach could be useful to guide safety policy development and resource allocation.

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More information

Published date: 20 September 2017
Venue - Dates: 4th International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety, ICTIS 2017, , Banff, Canada, 2017-08-08 - 2017-08-10
Keywords: high-crash zones, multilevel modelling, risk-adjusted ranking, zonal-level ranking

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 424171
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/424171
PURE UUID: d3c6cbe5-0055-452b-9861-82851023ae66

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 05 Oct 2018 11:31
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 12:11

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Contributors

Author: Shahram Heydari
Author: Liping Fu
Author: Lalita Thakali
Author: Lawrence Joseph

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