Yu Hongwei, Hu Xiaoyue, Gao Juan
Institute of Quality Development Strategy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, People's Republic of China.
School of Political Science and Public Administration, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, People's Republic of China.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2023 Jan;30(2):2703-2720. doi: 10.1007/s11356-022-22322-3. Epub 2022 Aug 6.
Haze pollution may decrease drivers' driving performance by worsening their physical and psychological states. This paper explores the effects of haze warning policy on traffic accidents for the first time. We use the daily-city traffic accident data from 2016 to 2019 in China and construct Regression Discontinuity (RD) strategies based on the warning signal thresholds of PM2.5 concentration for estimations. The results show that one yellow warning and one orange warning can reduce traffic accidents by 8.8% and 13.1% on that day respectively, while the red warning does not work significantly possibly due to the self-perceived channel rather than the warning-signal channel. We also find that the effects may vary among different groups of drivers, vehicles, and roads. Our results prove that the haze warning policy is a non-negligible tool to reduce traffic accidents, which is useful to policy-making both related to haze pollution regulation and transportation safety.
雾霾污染可能会通过恶化驾驶员的身心状态而降低其驾驶表现。本文首次探讨了雾霾预警政策对交通事故的影响。我们使用了2016年至2019年中国城市每日交通事故数据，并基于PM2.5浓度的预警信号阈值构建回归断点（RD）策略进行估计。结果表明，一次黄色预警和一次橙色预警分别可在当日将交通事故减少8.8%和13.1%，而红色预警效果不显著，这可能是由于自我认知渠道而非预警信号渠道所致。我们还发现，不同驾驶员、车辆和道路群体的影响可能存在差异。我们的结果证明，雾霾预警政策是减少交通事故的一个不可忽视的工具，这对雾霾污染治理和交通安全相关的政策制定都很有用。
