Title

Development of zone system for macro-level traffic safety analysis

Authors

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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