Citation

Agarwal PK, Garg S, Jain V. JoRATTS 2014; 1(1/ 2): 13-25.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Advance Research Publications)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Safety on road has degraded to a great extent as road accidents are increasing causing huge socio economic losses. A proactive measure for reducing the rate of accidents is to identify hazardous locations for treatment. Accident hazardous locations are generally identified based on the numbers of accidents occurred at those locations. Many theories of occurrence of accident at a location have been evolved since more than a century. However, a critical review of literature indicated that most of these theories fail to explain as the concept of cause of accident has been applied in a deterministic sense.  The cause always produces the effect, and the same cause always has the same effect. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to propose a statistical approach to identify the accident hazardous locations in a road network. This study proposes to identify hazardous locations on the basis of two statistical measures. First measure, termed as Degree of Risk is proposed to assess risk hazards due to different types of accident injuries. Another measure, termed as Accident Hazardous Index is proposed to identify the hazardous location by assessing the total risk hazards that a location experiences due to different type of accidents injury. The proposed approach is capable of identifying all types of hazardous location by considering all types of locations (intersections and mid-block section, rural and urban locations, etc.) together on one list thus the type of location does not matter. Thus, the approach is not location specific. The approach can be used to identify hazardous location when accident data is available for a period shorter or greater than one year. Thus, it is expected that this study will be useful to improve safety condition in the road network.

Language: en