INJURY RISKS IN COLLISIONS INVOLVING BUSES IN ALBERTA

摘要

This paper investigated the factors that contributed to injury in collisions that involved at least one bus inthe province of Alberta. The analysis is based on Alberta Crash Data from 2000-2007. In this study, allkinds of buses (i.e. school bus, transit bus, intercity bus and other bus) crashes were considered. Fourseparate logistic regression models were calibrated: 1) single vehicle collisions on highways; 2) singlevehicle collisions in non-highway locations; 3) two vehicles collisions on highways; and 4) two vehiclescollisions on non-highway locations. The contributing factors to collision severity examined were:weather condition, characteristics of collision partner, collision partner’s driver age, bus driver age, bus,age, grade and sag sections, lighting conditions and collision location. Our analysis showed that weathercondition was a significant contributing factor in all four types of collisions. Interestingly, adverseweather condition resulted in fewer injuries. Our results also showed that types of collision,characteristics of collision partner, collision partner’s driver age and weather condition had significanteffect on severity level for collisions occurring on both highway and non-highway locations.Additionally, the driver age of bus and collision partner were found to be significant factors in collisionseverity. Other factors were shown to affect injury risk only in one particular situation. For instance, forhighway related collisions, driver age of collision partner had significant effect on severity levels whereasthe age of the bus driver didn’t. In addition, for highway collisions, collision severity was higher for head19on crashes, bus–bus crashes, bus–truck crashes, bus-motorcycle crashes, older buses, on grade and insags, during dark and sun glare whereas probability decreased with larger outside shoulder width. Fornon-highway locations, crashes occurring near tunnel/underpass/overpass/signalized intersection wereshown to result in higher probability of injury. Our results also showed that pedestrian involved single23bus collisions on non-highway road had higher injury risk than involvement of any other objects.