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A time-series analysis of motorway collisions in England considering road infrastructure, socio-demographics, traffic and weather characteristics
journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-18, 11:55 authored by Paraskevi Michalaki, Mohammed Quddus, D.E. Pitfield, Andrew HuetsonTraffic 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 lingering effects of
preceding observations for the two time-series. In terms of the significance of exogenous variables, it is
suggested that main carriageway collision frequency is affected by weather conditions and the presence
of Heavy Goods Vehicles, while hard–shoulder collisions are decreased by the presence of Motorway
Service Areas, which allow a safe exit off the motorway to stop and rest in case of fatigue.
Funding
This research was undertaken as part of an Engineering Doctorate project jointly funded by the Centre of Innovative and Collaborative Construction Engineering (CICE) at Loughborough University and Balfour Beatty. The support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is gratefully acknowledged (EPSRC Grant EP/F037272/1).
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Journal of Transport & HealthVolume
3Issue
1Pages
9-20Citation
MICHALAKI, P. ... et al., 2016. A time-series analysis of motorway collisions in England considering road infrastructure, socio-demographics, traffic and weather characteristics. Journal of Transport & Health, 3(1), pp. 9-20.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-10-22Publication date
2016-02-11Copyright date
2016Notes
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).ISSN
2214-1405Publisher version
Language
- en