Statistical Methods Highway Safety Data Analysis And Evaluation Occupant Protection Systematic Reviews And Meta Analysis

This Transportation Research Record contains 28 papers dealing with statistical methods in highway safety research; highway safety data, analysis, and evaluation; occupant protection; and systematic reviews and meta-analysis. The papers address such topics as risk and crash prediction models, crashes on freeways and at signalized intersections, multivehicle crash prediction, speed and safety, red light running crashes, freeway lane closures, ramp design, accident exposure, rumble strip benefits, collisions with median trees, intersection safety, accident reconstruction, safety effects of speed limit changes, geometric design and head-on crashes, deer-vehicle crashes, sport utility vehicle rollover, vehicle occupancy and crash risk, a logit model for studying injury severity, abdominal injuries in rail passengers, healthy transport policies, and meta-analysis.

Covers empirical approaches to outlier detection in intelligent transportation systems data, modeling of traffic crash-flow relationships for intersections, profiling of high-frequency accident locations by use of association rules, analysis of rollovers and injuries with sport utility vehicles, and automated accident detection at intersections via digital audio signal processing.

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 295: Statistical Methods in Highway Safety Analysis focus on the type of safety analysis required to support traditional engineering functions, such as the identification of hazardous locations and the development and evaluation of countermeasures. Analyses related specifically to driver and vehicle safety are not covered, but some statistical methods used in these areas are of relevance and are summarized where appropriate.

Transportation Research Record contains the following papers: Method for identifying factors contributing to driver-injury severity in traffic crashes (Chen, WH and Jovanis, PP); Crash- and injury-outcome multipliers (Kim, K); Guidelines for identification of hazardous highway curves (Persaud, B, Retting, RA and Lyon, C); Tools to identify safety issues for a corridor safety-improvement program (Breyer, JP); Prediction of risk of wet-pavement accidents : fuzzy logic model (Xiao, J, Kulakowski, BT and El-Gindy, M); Analysis of accident-reduction factors on California state highways (Hanley, KE, Gibby, AR and Ferrara, T); Injury effects of rollovers and events sequence in single-vehicle crashes (Krull, KA, Khattack, AJ and Council, FM); Analytical modeling of driver-guidance schemes with flow variability considerations (Kaysi, I and Ail, NH); Evaluating the effectiveness of Norway's speak out! road safety campaign : The logic of causal inference in road safety evaluation studies (Elvik, R); Effect of speed, flow, and geometric characteristics on crash frequency for two-lane highways (Garber, NJ and Ehrhart, AA); Development of a relational accident database management system for Mexican federal roads (Mendoza, A, Uribe, A, Gil, GZ and Mayoral, E); Estimating traffic accident rates while accounting for traffic-volume estimation error : a Gibbs sampling approach (Davis, GA); Accident prediction models with and without trend : application of the generalized estimating equations procedure (Lord, D and Persaud, BN); Examination of methods that adjust observed traffic volumes on a network (Kikuchi, S, Miljkovic, D and van Zuylen, HJ); Day-to-day travel-time trends and travel-time prediction form loop-detector data (Kwon, JK, Coifman, B and Bickel, P); Heuristic vehicle classification using inductive signatures on freeways (Sun, C and Ritchie, SG).

"Includes 30 papers that explore modeling crash frequency by severity, time series analysis of road risk, crash data analysis using bootstrapped maximum likelihood method, time series analysis of the effect of holidays on daily traffic counts, regression-to-mean effect in traffic safety evaluation, roundabouts, and the safety impact of improved signal visibility."--TRB summary website.