Citation

Toran Pour A, Moridpour S, Tay R, Rajabifard A. Traffic Injury Prev. 2018; 19(1): 81-87.

Affiliation

Department of Infrastructure Engineering , The University of Melbourne , Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/15389588.2017.1341630

PMID

28605251

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Every year, about 1.24 million people are killed in traffic crashes in the world and more than 22% of these deaths are pedestrians. Therefore, pedestrian safety has become one of the significant traffic safety issues in the world. In order to develop effective and targeted safety programs, the location and time-specific influences on vehicle-pedestrian crashes must be assessed. The main purpose of this research is to explore the influence of pedestrians' age and gender on the temporal and spatial distribution of vehicle-pedestrian crashes to identify the hotspots and hot-times.

METHODS: Data for all vehicle-pedestrian crashes on public roadways in the Melbourne metropolitan area from 2004 to 2013 are used in this research. Spatial autocorrelation is applied in examining the vehicle-pedestrian crashes in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to identify any dependency between time and location of these crashes. Spider plot and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is then used to determine the temporal and spatial patterns of vehicle-pedestrian crashes for different age groups and gender types.

RESULTS: Temporal analysis shows that pedestrian age has a significant influence on the temporal distribution of vehicle-pedestrian crashes. Furthermore, men and women have different crash patterns. In addition, results of the spatial analysis shows that areas with high risk of vehicle-pedestrian crashes can vary during different times of the day for different age groups and gender types. For example, for the age group between 18 and 65, most of the vehicle-pedestrian crashes occur in the Central of Business District (CBD) during the day, but between 7:00 pm and 6:00 am, crashes for this age group occur mostly around hotels, clubs and bars.

CONCLUSIONS: This research reveals that temporal and spatial distributions of vehicle-pedestrian crashes vary for different pedestrians' age groups and gender types. Therefore, specific safety measures should be placed during the high crash times at different locations for different age groups and gender types to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures in preventing and reducing the vehicle-pedestrian crashes.

Language: en

Keywords

Age; Gender; Spatial distribution; Temporal distribution; Vehicle-pedestrian crashes