Earthquake Impacts on Traffic Safety Using Crowdsourced and Police-Reported Crash Data [Supporting Dataset]

Details

• Creators:
  Chupp, William ; Flynn, Dan F.B. ; Fox, Emma ; McGuire, Jeffrey J ; McBride, Sara K ; de Groot, Robert M ; Malwitz, Andrew
• Corporate Creators:
  John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (U.S.) ; United States Geological Survey (USGS). Earthquake Science Center. Moffett Field, California ; United States Geological Survey (USGS). Geological Hazards Science Center. Golden, Colorado
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Earthquakes
  • Traffic safety
  • Data collection
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Crash reports
  • Incident management
  • Forecasting
• Resource Type:
  Dataset
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Corporate Publisher:
  John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (U.S.)
• Abstract:
  Research in support of regional earthquake early warning systems (e.g., the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) managed ShakeAlert® Earthquake Early Warning System) has revealed a gap in information about the impacts of earthquakes on roadway safety. To help fill this gap, this research integrated earthquake shaking data, crowdsourced navigation application data, and police crash reports to quantify and investigate crash rates after seismic events. This study includes over 400 earthquakes with magnitude (Mw) 4.0 or above within the contiguous United States since 2017. The Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) measure of shaking from the USGS ShakeMap product is used in conjunction with road network geometry in areas of potentially felt shaking. The MMI estimates at locations of crash reports generated by users and crash reports from California Highway Patrol (CHP) are used to quantify the frequency of crashes in earthquake-affected regions. Crash frequency per kilometer of roadway before and after earthquakes in different MMI bins are compared visually, and the influence of shaking intensity on crash counts is assessed using regression analyses including control periods from the previous year. Most crash reports occur in areas where shaking is MMI 3.5 or below, owing to the rapid decay of shaking with distance from the fault, leading to much larger areas impacted by lower shaking intensities. There are only marginal differences before/after earthquakes between the frequencies of crowdsourced or CHP crash reports in these low MMI regions. There are a few individual instances of crashes after an earthquake in regions experiencing MMI greater than 3.5 where there are few or no crashes in similar control periods. However, the number of reports in those regions is low, less than ten for some MMI bins, so it is not yet possible to draw conclusions from the results in high MMI regions.
• Format:
  ZIP
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/93228/dot_93228_DS1.zip
• File Type:
  [ZIP - 204.67 MB]
• Collection(s):
  Volpe Center
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:867741789429de048dcf0f4d4689523a8ea03e065b7bc8733d6e8d0f3ab742ecd234b05f75d136e21fc4466990f8216d274258525ed35c1447296e51f69c3f7d