Differences of overturned and hit-fixed-object crashes on rural roads accompanied by speeding driving: Accommodating potential temporal shifts

Abstract

Overturned crashes are associated with a disproportionate number of severe injuries and fatalities, while hit-fixed-object crashes are acknowledged as the most frequent single-vehicle crashes. To investigate the temporal stability and differences of contributing factors determining different injury severity levels in overturned and hit-fixed-object crashes on rural roads accompanied by speeding driving, this paper estimates two groups of correlated random parameters logit models with heterogeneity in the means (one group relating to overturned crashes and the other relating to hit-fixed-object crashes). Three injury-severity categories are determined as outcome variables: severe injury, minor injury and no injury, while multiple factors are investigated as explanatory variables including driver, vehicle, roadway, environmental, and crash characteristics. The overall temporal instability and non-transferability between overturned and hit-fixed-object crashes are captured through likelihood ratio tests. Marginal effects are adopted to further exhibit temporal variations of the explanatory variables. Despite the overall temporal instability, some variables still present relative temporal stability such as alcohol, truck, aggressive driving, vehicle age (>14 years old), and speed limit (<45 mph). This non-transferability between overturned and hit-fixed-object crashes provides insights into developing differentiated strategies targeted at mitigating and preventing different types of crashes. Besides, out-of-sample prediction is undertaken given the captured temporal instability and non-transferability of overturned and hit-fixed-object crash observations. More studies can be conducted to accommodate the spatial instability, under-reporting of severe-injury crashes, the trade-off between model predictive capability, inference capability, and selectivity bias.