Injury Severity of Motorcycle Riders Involved in Traffic Crashes in Hunan, China: A Mixed Ordered Logit Approach

Abstract

Issues related to motorcycle safety in China have not received enough research attention. As such, the causal relationship between injury outcomes of motorcycle crashes and potential risk factors remains unknown. This study intended to investigate the injury risk of motorcyclists involved in road traffic crashes in China. To account for the ordinal nature of response outcomes and unobserved heterogeneity, a mixed ordered logit model was employed. Given that the crash occurrence process is different between intersections and non-intersections, separate models were developed for these locations to independently estimate the impacts of various contributing factors on motorcycle riders’ injury severity. The analysis was based on the police-reported crash dataset obtained from the Traffic Administration Bureau of Hunan Provincial Public Security Ministry. Factors associated with a substantially higher probability of fatalities and severe injuries included motorcycle riders older than 60 years, the absence of helmets, motorcycle riders identified to be equal duty, and when a motorcycle collided with a heavy vehicle during the night time without lighting. Crashes occurred along county roads with curve and slope alignment or at regions with higher GDP were associated with an elevated risk of fatality of motorcycle riders, while unsignalized intersections were related to less severe injuries. Findings of this study are beneficial in forming several targeted countermeasures for motorcycle safety in China, including designing roads with appropriate road delineation and street lighting, strict enforcement for speeding and red light violations, promoting helmet usage, and improving the conspicuity of motorcyclists.

Evaluating the Driving Risk of Near-Crash Events Using a Mixed-Ordered Logit Model

“…In this study the threshold values are less than 0.6 s and −0.4 m/s 2 for time headway and deceleration, respectively, and more than 10 mpa for braking pressure. These thresholds are reasonable and validated by many experiments conducted in related studies, especially in China [18,20]. Figure 1 shows an example of a near-crash event observed during the naturalist driving experiment.…”

“…PCA has been successful in identifying the primary components of driver distraction to visual-manual tasks from driver performance variables. However, in our case, PCA may not be a good option as there are two types of variables (continuous and categorical), and we follow the method provided by Sunghee Park et al [27] and Chang et al [18]. PCA is suitable for continuous variables, such as speed and deceleration, but there are several significant categorical variables (road type and near-crash causes) in this study, and they could not be included if we used PCA.…”

“…This study evaluated driving risk by the contributing factors of near-crash events (similar to Wang et al [17] and Guo et al [16]) rather than analyzing driving risk by crash data (similar to Chang et al [18]). In crash data, if severity levels are precise and identified in advance, then one needs only to select the proper regression model and load the severity of crashes as the dependent variable and other factors as the independent variables.…”

Perceptual training to increase drivers’ ability to spot motorcycles at T-junctions

“…Even compared to other vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, the fatality rate is staggeringly high (Department for Transport, 2016). This increased risk is reflected across Europe (EC, 2015), and many other countries including America (NHTSA, 2007), Australia (Johnston, Brooks & Savage, 2008), China (Chang et al, 2016), and New Zealand (Walton, Buchanan & Murray, 2013).…”

Likelihood of Motorcyclists Transferring to Safer Mode of Transport in Cairo, Egypt

“…Hence, collaborative efforts are required to develop appropriate preventive interventions in underdeveloped and developing countries that recorded high numbers of accidents. In addition, [5][6][7] further emphasized that nearly a quarter of the people killed in road traffic accidents are motorcyclists and most of the motorcycle accidents lead to road traffic injuries and deaths.On the other hand, a considerable number of past researches revealed that motorcyclists are a standout amongst the most unsafe types of mechanized transportation because the size of their vehicles is small, thus they are part of road users who are critically exposed to danger [8]. Regarding this matter, data obtained from Great Britain demonstrate that motorcyclists are more in danger of death risks or suffer non-fatal injuries in a road traffic crash compared to other vehicle users [9].…”