Eco-friendly Smart Vehicle Research Center, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea; Cho Chun Shik Graduate School of Green Transportation, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea; Department of Transportation Engineering, The University of Seoul, Seoul, South Korea.
Alabama Transportation Institute, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA.
Accid Anal Prev. 2023 Dec;193:107333. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.2023.107333. Epub 2023 Oct 11.
Pedestrians walking along the road's edge are more exposed and vulnerable than those on designated crosswalks. Often, they remain oblivious to the imminent perils of potential collisions with vehicles, making crashes involving these pedestrians relatively unique compared to others. While previous research has recognized that the surrounding lighting conditions influence traffic crashes, the effect of different lighting conditions on walking-along-the-road pedestrian injury severity outcomes remains unexplored. This study examines the variations in the impact of risk factors on walking-along-the-road pedestrian-involved crash injury severity across various lighting conditions. Preliminary stability tests on the walking-along-the-road pedestrian-involved crash data obtained from Ghana revealed that the effect of most risk factors on injury severity outcomes is likely to differ under each lighting condition, warranting the estimation of separate models for each lighting condition. Thus, the data were grouped based on the lighting conditions, and different models were estimated employing the random parameter logit model with heterogeneity in the means approach to capture different levels of unobserved heterogeneity in the crash data. From the results, heavy vehicles, shoulder presence, and aged drivers were found to cause fatal pedestrian walking-along-the-road severity outcomes during daylight conditions, indicators for male pedestrians and speeding were identified to have stronger associations with fatalities on roads with no light at night, and crashes occurring on Tuesdays and Wednesdays were likely to be severe on lit roads at night. From the marginal effect estimates, although some explanatory variables showed consistent effects across various lighting conditions in pedestrian walking-along-the-road crashes, such as pedestrians aged < 25 years and between 25 and 44 years exhibited significant variations in their impact across different lighting conditions, supporting the finding that the effect of risk factors are unstable. Further, the out-of-sample simulations underscored the shifts in factor effects between different lighting conditions, highlighting that enhancing visibility could play a pivotal role in significantly reducing fatalities associated with pedestrians walking along the road. Targeted engineering, education, and enforcement countermeasures are proposed from the interesting insights drawn to improve pedestrian safety locally and internationally.
行人走在路边比走在指定的人行横道上更容易受到伤害。通常情况下，他们对潜在的与车辆碰撞的危险浑然不觉，这使得与这些行人相关的事故与其他事故相比具有独特性。尽管之前的研究已经认识到周围的照明条件会影响交通事故，但不同照明条件对行人在路边行走受伤严重程度的影响仍未得到研究。本研究探讨了在不同照明条件下，风险因素对行人在路边行走事故伤害严重程度的影响的变化。对加纳行人在路边行走事故数据进行初步稳定性测试后发现，大多数风险因素对伤害严重程度结果的影响在每种照明条件下都可能不同，因此需要为每种照明条件分别建立模型。因此，根据照明条件对数据进行分组，并使用具有均值异质性的随机参数对数模型估计不同的模型，以捕捉事故数据中不同水平的未观察到的异质性。结果表明，在白天，重型车辆、路肩存在和老年司机是导致行人在路边行走致命伤害的原因；在夜间无照明道路上，男性行人指示符和超速行驶与致命事故的关联性更强；在夜间有灯光的道路上，星期二和星期三发生的事故更有可能是严重的。从边际效应估计值来看，尽管一些解释变量在行人在路边行走的事故中具有一致的影响，但有些变量在不同的照明条件下的影响存在显著差异，例如年龄小于 25 岁和 25 至 44 岁的行人，这支持了风险因素的影响不稳定的发现。此外，样本外模拟强调了不同照明条件下因素效应的变化，突出了提高能见度在显著减少与行人在路边行走相关的死亡人数方面可能发挥关键作用。根据得出的有趣见解，提出了有针对性的工程、教育和执法对策，以提高当地和国际的行人安全。
