Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.
Department of City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 18;16(3):e0248311. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248311. eCollection 2021.
Improving road safety and setting targets for reducing traffic-related crashes and deaths are highlighted as part of the United Nations sustainable development goals and worldwide vision zero efforts. The advent of transportation network companies and ridesourcing expands mobility options in cities and may impact road safety outcomes. We analyze the effects of ridesourcing use on road crashes, injuries, fatalities, and driving while intoxicated (DWI) offenses in Travis County, Texas. Our approach leverages real-time ridesourcing volume to explain variation in road safety outcomes. Spatial panel data models with fixed-effects are deployed to examine whether the use of ridesourcing is significantly associated with road crashes and other safety metrics. Our results suggest that for a 10% increase in ridesourcing trips, we expect a 0.12% decrease in road crashes, a 0.25% decrease in road injuries, and a 0.36% decrease in DWI offenses in Travis County. On the other hand, ridesourcing use is not significantly associated with road fatalities. This study augments existing work because it moves beyond binary indicators of ridesourcing availability and analyzes crash and ridesourcing trips patterns within an urbanized area rather than their metropolitan-level variation. Contributions include developing a data-rich approach for assessing the impacts of ridesourcing use on the transportation system's safety, which may serve as a template for future analyses for other cities. Our findings provide feedback to policymakers by clarifying associations between ridesourcing use and traffic safety and uncover the potential to achieve safer mobility systems with transportation network companies.
提高道路安全水平，并设定减少与交通相关的碰撞和死亡人数的目标，这是联合国可持续发展目标和全球零愿景努力的重点。交通网络公司和乘车共享服务的出现扩大了城市的交通选择，可能会影响道路安全结果。我们分析了德克萨斯州特拉维斯县乘车共享服务的使用对道路碰撞、伤害、死亡和酒后驾车 (DWI) 违规的影响。我们的方法利用实时乘车共享量来解释道路安全结果的变化。采用具有固定效应的空间面板数据模型来检验乘车共享服务的使用是否与道路碰撞和其他安全指标显著相关。我们的结果表明，乘车共享服务每增加 10%，预计道路碰撞将减少 0.12%，道路伤害将减少 0.25%，DWI 违规将减少 0.36%。另一方面，乘车共享服务的使用与道路死亡人数没有显著关联。这项研究的贡献在于，它超越了乘车共享服务可用性的二进制指标，分析了城市化地区的碰撞和乘车共享服务出行模式，而不是它们的大都市层面变化。这项研究还为评估乘车共享服务使用对交通系统安全的影响提供了一种数据丰富的方法，可为其他城市的未来分析提供模板。我们的研究结果通过阐明乘车共享服务使用与交通安全之间的关联，并揭示了通过交通网络公司实现更安全的出行系统的潜力，为政策制定者提供了反馈。
