Exploration and Identification of Hazardous Traffic Flow States before Crash Occurrences on Freeways

The main objective of this study is to examine the relationship between traffic flow states and the risks of crash occurrences on freeways and to identify hazardous traffic flow states highly related to crash occurrences. Using traffic flow data and crash data collected from the I-880 freeway in the state of California, United States, K-means clustering analysis was conducted to classify traffic flow into five homogeneous traffic flow states. A case-control study was designed to compare the traffic flow states before the occurrences of crashes to those did not lead to crashes. Four logistic regression models were developed to study the relationship between the risk of crash occurrences and five traffic flow states. It was found that three hazardous traffic flow states were highly related to crash occurrences. And the odds ratios estimated by logistic regression models quantify the impacts of hazardous traffic flow states on crash occurrences on freeways. Finally, a method based on discriminant analysis was further developed to identify hazardous traffic flow states given real time freeway traffic flow data. Validation results show that this method is of reasonably high accuracy for identifying hazardous freeway traffic flow states.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Xu, Chengcheng
  • Liu, Pan
  • Wang, Wei
  • Yu, Chunjun
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2011-1-23 to 2011-1-27
• Date: 2011

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: TRB 90th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Cluster analysis; Crash data; Crash risk forecasting; Freeway operations; High risk locations; Real time information; Risk analysis; Traffic crashes; Traffic data; Traffic flow; Validation
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01336702
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 11-2964
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Apr 18 2011 12:24PM