Investigating Spatial Autocorrelation and Spillover Effects in Freeway Crash-Frequency Data

Huiying Wen, Xuan Zhang, Qiang Zeng, Jaeyoung Lee and Quan Yuan
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Huiying Wen: School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China
Xuan Zhang: School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China
Qiang Zeng: School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China
Jaeyoung Lee: Department of Civil, Environment and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA
Quan Yuan: State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 2, 1-12

Abstract: This study attempts to investigate spatial autocorrelation and spillover effects in micro traffic safety analysis. To achieve the objective, a Poisson-based count regression with consideration of these spatial effects is proposed for modeling crash frequency on freeway segments. In the proposed hybrid model, the spatial autocorrelation and the spillover effects are formulated as the conditional autoregressive (CAR) prior and the exogenous variables of adjacent segments, respectively. The proposed model is demonstrated and compared to the models with only one kind of spatial effect, using one-year crash data collected from Kaiyang Freeway, China. The results of Bayesian estimation conducted in WinBUGS show that significant spatial autocorrelation and spillover effects simultaneously exist in the freeway crash-frequency data. The lower value of deviance information criterion (DIC) and more significant exogenous variables for the hybrid model compared to the other alternatives, indicate the strength of accounting for both spatial autocorrelation and spillover effects on improving model fit and identifying crash contributing factors. Moreover, the model results highlight the importance of daily vehicle kilometers traveled, and horizontal and vertical alignments of targeted segments and adjacent segments on freeway crash occurrences.

Keywords: spatial autocorrelation; spatial spillover effects; conditional autoregressive prior; freeway crash frequency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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