Exploring Risk Factors Contributing to the Severity of Hazardous Material Transportation Accidents in China

Yingying Xing, Shengdi Chen, Shengxue Zhu, Yi Zhang and Jian Lu
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Yingying Xing: College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the State Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rail Infrastructure Durability and System Safety, Shanghai 201804, China
Shengdi Chen: School of Transport & Communications, Shanghai Maritime University, 1550 Haigang Street, Shanghai 201306, China
Shengxue Zhu: Jiangsu key Laboratory of Traffic and Transportation Security, Huaiyin Institute of Technology, Huaian 223003, China
Yi Zhang: Department of Transportation Engineering, School of Naval Architecture, Ocean & Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Jian Lu: College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the State Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rail Infrastructure Durability and System Safety, Shanghai 201804, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 4, 1-19

Abstract: With the increasing demand of hazardous material (Hazmat), traffic accidents occurred frequently during Hazmat transportation, which had caused widespread concern in communities. Therefore, a good understanding of Hazmat transportation accident characteristics and contributing factors is of practical importance. In this study, 1721 Hazmat accidents that have occurred during road transportation for the period 2014–2017 in China were examined, and a random-parameters ordered probit model was established to explore the influence of contributing factors on the severity of accidents by accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in the data. Both the injuries and the number of people evacuated were considered as the indicator of accident severity and investigated, respectively. Results show that higher injury severity is likely to be associated with type of Hazmat (compressed gas, explosive, and poison), misoperation, driver fatigue, speeding, tunnel, slope, county road, dry road surface, winter, dark, more than two vehicles, rear end crash, and explosion. As for the correlation between risk factors and the severity of evacuation, type of Hazmat (compressed gas, explosive, and poison), quantity of Hazmat (10–39 t), misoperation, county road, dry road surface, weekdays, dusk, explosion significantly contribute to increasing the severity of evacuation of Hazmat accidents.

Keywords: Hazmat; road transportation; accident severity; risk factors; random-parameters ordered probit model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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