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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

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Title:

Spatial Analysis of Fatal and Injury Crashes in Pennsylvania

Abstract:

The purpose of this research is to develop spatial models of road crashes for the State of Pennsylvania at the county level while controlling for socioeconomic, transportation- related, and environmental factors. The results from Full Bayes Hierarchical spatial models are compared with the more traditional approach using a Negative Binomial distribution to model crash frequency. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion of weather as a predictor and the search for spatial correlation among neighboring counties. Weather-related factors included mean total precipitation, mean number of rainy days, mean total snowfall and mean number of days with snow. The studies found positive correlation between weather and crash frequency. Spatial trend and correlation of weather variables with elevation are included into the models to improve their predictive power and fit.

Source(s):

85th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Pennsylvania State University. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2006

Author:

Aguero-Valverdea, Jovanisa

Keywords:


Safety
Precipitation
Snow
Rain

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