These days, road safety has become a major concern in most modern societies. In this respect, the determination of road locations that are more dangerous than others (black spots or also called 'sites with promise') can help in better scheduling road safety policies. The present paper proposes a multivariate model to identify and rank sites according to their hazardousness. To this end, the model takes into account the total number of accidents per site, but also the number of injured victims, including fatalities, light and severe injuries, and uses a cost function to rank sites with respect to their total expected cost to the society. Bayesian estimation of the model via a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach is discussed in the paper. To illustrate the proposed model, accident data from 23184 accident locations in Flanders (Belgium) are used and a cost function proposed by the European Transport Safety Council is adopted to illustrate the model. It is shown in the paper that the model produces insightful results that can be used by policy makers to prioritize road infrastructure investments. (Author/publisher) The report is available at: http://www.steunpuntverkeersveiligheid.be/nl/modules/press/store/93.pdf
Abstract