Factors propelling fatalities during road crashes: A detailed investigation and modelling of historical crash data with field studies

One of the major concerns in developing countries like India is to maintain traffic safety under mixed and heterogenous scenario. Although zero accidents is the need of the hour, the first step to attain it is ensuring zero deaths and no serious long-term disabling injuries in road crashes. To reduce the road crash fatalities, explicit and detailed studies have been conducted by utilising historical road crash data of two emerging smart cities of India - Bhubaneswar and Visakhapatnam. Traffic flow data and characteristics of road infrastructure has also been collected by performing field studies at accident prone locations. Various factors including vehicular characteristics, road user characteristics, and road infrastructure have been analyzed using various non-parametric tests to identify the contributing factors resulting in fatalities. It is observed that out of 14 variables used for study, 8 factors were significantly related to fatal crashes. These included categories of victim and accused, 85th percentile speed, presence of road markings, availability of sight distance, etc. The significant factors were subjected to binary logistic regression to determine the odd’s ratio of significant factors. The logistic regression predicted 79% of deaths correctly. Crash fatality prediction models are developed using both Classification and Regression Tree (CART) classification tree with 83% accuracy. Although CART classification led to higher accuracy, binary logistic regression is more robust as it considered more significant factors as compared to CART. Subsequently, a severity index has been proposed based on proportions of actual fatal crashes and usage of K-means clustering technique. The proposed indices shall be really helpful in traffic safety management, specifically in reduction of fatalities during road crashes.