Analysis of traffic crashes considering the field of view

Road transportation plays an indispensable role in people's lives as it forms the backbone of regions and towns, shapes the environment and landscape, and supports daily life and economic activities. However, it also constantly carries the risk of traffic crashes, making it an ongoing social issue amidst the development of road transportation. While there has been a decreasing trend in the number of traffic crashes and fatalities in recent years, many traffic crashes still occur, with over half of them happening at intersections or nearby. Past research on traffic crashes around intersections has predominantly focused on large-scale intersections, lacking sufficient analysis on small-scale intersections in residential areas due to data limitations. Therefore, in this study, we aggregated OpenData-based intersection representations for obtaining the number of corner cuts (so called “sumikiri” in Japan) via a computational-geometric approach for relating them to nearby-situated facilities and finding relationships between visibility characteristics and the number of traffic crashes, particularly focusing on small-scale intersections. The multiple linear regression analysis revealed that while the number of corner cuts did not show a significant impact on the number of traffic crashes at large-scale intersections, they had a statistically significant negative impact on traffic crashes at medium to small-scale intersections. This implies that intersection size influences the impact of corner cuts (i.e., visibility) on traffic crash occurrence. The results of this study suggest a potential relationship between the corner cut and the occurrence of traffic crashes at medium to small-scale intersections, providing insights that could contribute to future traffic crash prevention strategies.