TY - JOUR PY - 2022// TI - Exploring relationships between months and different crash types on mountainous freeways using a combined modeling approach JO - Journal of advanced transportation A1 - Zhang, Changjian A1 - He, Jie A1 - Bai, Chunguang A1 - Yan, Xintong A1 - Wang, Chenwei A1 - Guo, Yazhong SP - e6716275 EP - e6716275 VL - 2022 IS - N2 - Investigating the relationship between the months and traffic crashes is a foremost task for the safety improvement of mountainous freeways. Taking a mountainous freeway located in China as an example, this paper proposed a combined modeling framework to identify the relationships between months and different crash types. K-means and Apriori were initially used to extract the monthly distribution patterns of different types of crashes. A graphical approach and a risk calculation equation were developed to assess the output of K-means and Apriori. Then, using the assessment results as the input, a logistic regression model was constructed to quantify the effects of each month on crashes. The results indicate that the monthly distribution patterns of different crash types are inconsistent, i.e., for a specific month, the high risk of a certain crash type may be covered up if experts only focus on the total number of crashes. Moreover, when identified as high-risk months by K-means and Apriori, the crash-proneness will significantly increase several times than months identified as high-risk by only one of K-means and Apriori, thereby illustrating the superior performance of the mix-method. The conclusions can assist local relevant organizations in formulating strategies for preventing different types of traffic crashes in different months (e.g., the risk of rear-end crashes in August, the risk of fixed-object hitting crashes in February, and the risk of overturning crashes in October) and provide a methodological reference for relevant studies in other regions.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 0197-6729 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2022/6716275 ID - ref1 ER -