Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0
Title:
Relationships Among Urban Freeway Accidents, Traffic Flow, Weather and Lighting Conditions
Abstract:
Linear and nonlinear multivariate statistical analyses are applied to determine how the types of accidents that occur on heavily used freeways in Southern California are related to both the flow of traffic and weather and ambient lighting conditions. Traffic flow is measured in terms of time series of 30-second observations from inductive loop detectors in the vicinity of the crash prior to the time of its occurrence. Results indicate that the type of crash is strongly related to median traffic speed and to temporal variations in speed in the left and interior lanes. Hit-object crashes and crashes involving multiple vehicles that are associated with lane-change maneuvers are more likely to occur on wet roads, while rear-end collisions are more likely to occur on dry roads during daylight. Controlling for weather and lighting conditions, there is evidence that crash severity is influenced more by volume than by speed.
Source(s):
California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH), University of California-Berkeley
http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1147[amp]context=its/path
Date: 2001
Author:
Golob, Recker
Keywords:
Crashes
Safety
Speed
Volume
Mobility
Adverse weather
Freeway management
Pavement condition
PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®.