Effect of Road Characteristics, Built Environment and other Factors on Crash Severity Levels Involving Pedestrians and Motor Vehicles

摘要

In spite of the benefits of walking and other non-motorized transportation modes, road facilities in urban areas are still an important source of harm to non-motorized road users. In particular, large Canadian cities like Montreal are facing serious pedestrian safety problems. In 2005, for instance, 1,830 pedestrians were injured on the island of Montreal, representing almost half of all pedestrians involved in road accidents in the province of Quebec. To address this problem, local governments have identified the safety of pedestrians as a high priority. To this end, investments are continually allocated through different safety improvement programs. However, there is a lack of analytical tools that help to identify and quantify the benefits of countermeasures such as roadway design, speed management strategies, or land use policies, for instance. Subsequently, the objectives of this research are: to develop injury severity models for determining the effects that road design, vehicle characteristics, built environment and other factors have on the injury severity levels of pedestrians involved in motor vehicle collisions. To develop injury severity models, this research integrates different sources of data including police report data describing vehicle-pedestrian collisions, as well as information on land use transit network, and road design attributes from the City of Montreal. After data preparation, various ordered-response modeling settings have been attempted. Accordingly, the impacts of road design, land use, built environment and other potential strategies on the injury severity levels of vulnerable users have been investigated. Among other results, it was found that the probability of a pedestrian fatality increases significantly when a crash occurs on a major road (arterials), with the type of vehicle involved in the accident and the vehicle movement. Conversely, after controlling for other factors, collisions occurring at intersection, in neighborhoods with high land use mix and near schools have lower chances of injury or death.