Abstract: Regional traffic safety poses a public concern for many metropolitan areas, making it urgent to adopt safety assessment and analysis methods that can effectively coordinate the different needs of a city’s districts. For example, safety performance in urban and suburban areas shows great disparity, making it unreasonable to assess the safety risk level of the two areas under the same criteria. Existing studies mainly use crash frequency or crash rate as indicators, but overlook that traffic violations can also measure regional traffic safety. To address these gaps, this study selected Suzhou, a rapidly developing Chinese city, for investigation. Socio-economic, roadway, land use, and police enforcement information of 115 districts in Suzhou were collected as independent variables. A composite assessment indicator was proposed considering crash rate, injury severity, violation rate, and area type. The 53 urban and 62 suburban districts were separately classified into three risk levels. Two random-effects two-level logit models (high-risk vs. moderate/low-risk, and moderate-risk vs. low-risk) were developed to capture the common influences of area types and various districts’ individual characteristics on regional risk level. Results showed that (1) population density and GDP per capita play important roles in distinguishing high-risk and moderate/low-risk towns; (2) higher road and intersection density, and higher percentage of collector roads, were associated with higher risk levels. It was also demonstrated that the number of traffic police and patrol time in moderate-risk districts can be reasonably reduced to avoid wasting police resources. The proposed method shows promise for regional risk identification and improvement.
Yingying Pei, Xuesong Wang*, Tianxiang Fan, Zhongyang Qie, Fang Liu. Regional Traffic Safety Assessment Considering Crashes and Violations: Safety Risk Level and Influencing Factors. Transportation Research Board 101st Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., USA, 2022. 1.9-13.