The effects of lighting on driver's injury severity at highway‐rail grade crossings

Abstract

SUMMARYThis study estimates the safety effect of illumination on accidents at highway-rail grade crossings in the United States, using data from exhaustive data from Federal Railroad Administration database covering the period 2002-2011. Using mixed logit modeling approach, the study explores the determinants of driver injury severity at unlighted highway-rail grade crossings compared with lighted highway-rail grade crossings in the United States. Several key issues are explored including availability of relevant highway-rail grade crossing accident inventory data; relevant data element structures; specification and estimation of models to estimate driver's injury severity with lighting and without lighting; and techniques to interpret model parameters. Overall, highway-rail grade crossing lighting improves safety by reducing the probability of high-level injury severity through improvements in driver's visibility compared with unlighted intersections.

The Impact of Aggressive Driving Behavior on Driver-Injury Severity at Highway-Rail Grade Crossings Accidents

“…The level of injury study at highway-rail grade crossings has received the interest and attention from researchers [15]. Hao et al [16][17][18][19][20][21] developed injury severity models to study the level of injury in different situations (control device types, area types, driver's age, gender, etc.). Guadamuz-Flores and Aguero-Valverde [22] used Full Bayesian Poisson-lognormal approaches to compare the effects of various models, including heterogeneity-only, spatial-only, and heterogeneity-spatial models.…”

Investigating the Differences of Single-Vehicle and Multivehicle Accident Probability Using Mixed Logit Model

“…Based on the results, two major strategies were suggested to reduce the impacts of adverse factor. Hao and Kamga [24] use ten-year crash data which occurred at highway-rail grade crossings to analyze the effect of lighting on driver injury severities based on mixed logit models. The authors established separate models for lighted intersection and unlighted intersection and found that there are common and different significant attributes for the two situations and suggested that it is necessary to focus more on how drivers react to emergencies at unlighted highway-rail intersections.…”