United States Department of Transportation
i
Investigation of Secondary Crash Along Highways in Utah, Phase I
-
2022-03-01
[PDF-1.38 MB]
Details:
-
Creators:
-
Corporate Creators:
-
Corporate Contributors:
-
Subject/TRT Terms:
-
Publication/ Report Number:
-
Resource Type:
-
Geographical Coverage:
-
Edition:Final Report Sept 2020 to March 2022
-
Corporate Publisher:
-
Abstract:The occurrence of secondary crashes on highways has many adverse effects, such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and more crashes. Research suggests that secondary crashes account for about 20% of all crashes and 18% of all fatalities on US freeways (Owens et al., 2010). While improving incident management is one of the effective ways to reduce the risk of secondary crashes, the identification of appropriate strategies relies on the understanding of contributing factors to secondary crashes, which need accurate secondary crash data. However, only 63 secondary crashes that occurred on I-15 in the state of Utah from 2018-2019 are recorded in UDOT’s crash database. Such data quality cannot meet the needs of developing effective incident management strategies. Therefore, the first goal of this project research is to develop an effective method to identify primary and secondary crashes from the crash database. Our research team proposes a hybrid method that can effectively identify primary and secondary crashes from all crash records on freeways. Based on the identified primary and secondary crashes, this project developed a binary logit model and found twelve contributing factors, including age of driver, snowy weather, angle collision, rear-end crash, multiple vehicles involved, collision with fixed objects, speed-related crash, minivan involved, adverse roadway surface condition, vehicle slowing in traffic lane, and roadway with straight alignment, are found to be positively associated with the occurrence of secondary crashes. Secondary crashes were also less likely to have occurred on weekends and in rural areas. Then the project implemented the HOPIT model to analyze the crash injury patterns in primary and secondary crashes and found several factors that may increase injury severity in primary crashes (e.g., suspected alcohol, angle collision, multiple vehicles involved, etc.) and secondary crashes (including suspected drugs, head-on collision, multiple vehicles involved, etc.), respectively.
-
Format:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type:
