It is well known that the major goal of the transportation system is to enhance mobility and crashes are unwanted by-products which have to be minimized while achieving the primary goal. Although general people value travel time more than any other outcomes of transportation system, traffic accidents impose huge economic burden on the society. A detail investigation of the State of California crash statistics showed overrepresentation of fatal, injury, alcohol related crashes, road departure crashes, speeding related crashes in Inland Empire and identified as one of the major transportation issues affecting this region. This seed-grant proposal aimed to investigate the reason behind the high crash statistics in Inland Empire by developing methodologies to identify crash hotspots and detecting the potential areas of safety improvements using Geographic Information System (GIS). However, significant challenges were faced during the research to obtain relevant crash data from Caltrans district 8. Hence the GIS based methodology was developed using data from another real city in the United States. The result of this study showed that spatial dependence plays a strong role in the analysis of road traffic injury crashes. These spatial dependences, accounted through the spatial autocorrelation helped detecting statistically significant clusters of fatal, severe and minor injury as well as pedestrian crashes. These clusters are overlaid with socioeconomic and road network layers to investigate if certain spatial, socioeconomic and traffic related factors are present near statistically significant crash clusters. Once this reconnaissance is completed, a more detailed site investigation is easier to find the contributory factors for fatal, injury and pedestrian crash occurrences. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting