Analysis of Traffic Conflict Characteristics and Key Factors Influencing Severity in Expressway Interchange Diverging Areas: Insights from a Chinese Freeway Safety Study

Feng Tang, Zhizhen Liu (), Zhengwu Wang and Ning Li
Additional contact information
Feng Tang: Engineering Research Center of Catastrophic Prophylaxis and Treatment of Road & Traffic Safety of Ministry of Education, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, China
Zhizhen Liu: School of Transportation, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, China
Zhengwu Wang: School of Transportation, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, China
Ning Li: School of Transportation, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, China

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 18, 1-33

Abstract: Conflicts in freeway interchange diverging areas remain poorly understood, particularly their characteristics and severity determinants. To address this gap, we extracted over 20,000 vehicle trajectories from UAV footage at 16 interchange divergence zone across five multi-lane expressways using a YOLOX–DeepSORT method. From these trajectories, we identified longitudinal and lateral conflicts and classified their severity into minor, moderate, and severe levels using a two-dimensional extended time-to-collision metric. Subsequently, we incorporated 19 macroscopic traffic-flow and microscopic driver-behavior variables into four conflict-severity models–multivariate logistic regression, random forest, CatBoost, and XGBoost—and conducted to identify the key determinants of conflict severity based on the optimal models. The results indicate that lateral conflicts last longer and pose higher collision risks than longitudinal ones. Furthermore, moderate conflicts are most prevalent, whereas severe conflicts are concentrated within 300 m upstream of exit ramps. Specifically, for longitudinal conflicts, the most influential factors include speed difference, target-vehicle speed, truck involvement, traffic density, and exit behavior. In contrast, for lateral conflicts, the most critical factors include lane-change frequency, speed difference, target-vehicle speed, distance to the exit ramp, and truck proportion. Overall, these findings support the development of hazardous-driving warning systems and proactive safety management strategies in interchange diverging areas.

Keywords: expressway; interchange diverging area; conflict severity; extended time-to-collision; key risk factors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/18/8419/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/18/8419/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:18:p:8419-:d:1753417

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().