Citation

Islam MR, Abdel-Aty M, Islam Z, Zhang S. Sustainability (Basel) 2022; 14(9): e5057.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/su14095057

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a global impact, disrupting the normal trends of our everyday life. More specifically, the effects of COVID-19 on road safety are still largely unexplored. Hence, this study aims to investigate the change in road safety trends due to COVID-19 using real-time traffic parameters.

RESULTS from the extensive analyses of the 2017 to 2020 data of Interstate-4 show that traffic volume decreased by 13.6% in 2020 compared to the average of 2017-2019's volume, whereas there is a decreasing number of crashes at the higher volume. Average speed increased by 11.3% during the COVID-19 period; however, the increase in average speed during the COVID-19 period has an insignificant relationship with crash severities. Fatal crashes increased, while total crashes decreased, during the COVID-19 period; severe crashes decreased with the total crashes. Alcohol-related crashes decreased by 22% from 2019 to 2020. Thus, the road-safety trend due to the impact of COVID-19 has evidently changed and presents a unique trend. The findings of the study suggest a larger need for a more in-depth study to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on road safety, to minimize fatalities on roads through appropriate policy measures.

Language: en

Keywords

COVID-19; fatal and severe crashes; fatalities; road-safety trend