Special Vehicles and Road Safety.

摘要

School buses and emergency vehicles are meant to provide special services to the society. Hence, safety of these special vehicles is a great concern. Investigating the crash characteristics of special vehicles is the first step towards improving the safety of these vehicles. Therefore, this dissertation intended to provide a framework for estimating the likelihood of school bus and emergency vehicle crash severity conditioned on the occurrence of an accident. This study used data from the Province of Alberta for the years 1999-2008. To address the influence of different exogenous factors on these special vehicles' crash severity, logistic regression, unordered response (i.e., multinomial logit model) and ordered response (i.e., ordered logit, generalized ordered logit and partially constrained generalized ordered logit model) models were utilized. The model results indicated that various crash, environmental, temporal, driver and vehicular characteristics significantly influenced both the school bus and emergency vehicle crash severity. Some of the variables that were found to have stronger influences on both the school bus and emergency vehicle crash severity were: non-use of seat belt by drivers, rural area, head-on and run-off-road collision.