Development of zone system for macro-level traffic safety analysis

    Authors

    J. Lee; M. Abdel-Aty;X. M. Jiang

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    J. Transp. Geogr.

    Keywords

    Traffic safety analysis zones; Macro-level analysis; MAUP; Bayesian; Poisson Log-normal model; Transportation safety planning; Regionalization; ACCIDENT PREDICTION MODELS; AREAL UNIT PROBLEM; SPATIAL-ANALYSIS; CRASH-FREQUENCY; POPULATION; FATALITIES; COLLISIONS; Economics; Geography; Transportation

    Abstract

    Various geographic units have been used in macro-level modeling. Amongst these units, traffic analysis zones (TAZs) have been broadly employed in many macroscopic safety studies. Nevertheless, no studies questioned the validity of TAZs for crash analysis at the macro-level crash modeling. In this study, we point out several possible problems of TAZs as spatial units for macroscopic safety studies. Current TAZs with homogenous crash rates were combined into new single zones. Then we created ten new zonal systems by different zone aggregation levels. The optimal zonal scale for traffic safety analysis zones (TSAZ) was determined using the Brown-Forsythe test. It was found that the zone system with about 1:2 aggregation was the optimal zone system for macroscopic safety modeling. Thus we develop what we call traffic safety analysis zones (TSAZs) that has the potential of reducing several possible problems of TAZs. Also it was shown that TSAZ based models had better fit compared to TAZ based models. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

    Journal Title

    Journal of Transport Geography

    Volume

    38

    Publication Date

    1-1-2014

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    13

    Last Page

    21

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000340319900002

    ISSN

    0966-6923

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