Accident; analysis and prevention
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Review Comparative Study
Exposure measurement in bicycle safety analysis: A review of the literature.
Cycling, as an active mode of transportation, has well-established health benefits. However, the safety of cyclists in traffic remains a major concern. In-depth studies of potential risk factors and safety outcomes are needed to ensure the most appropriate actions are taken to improve safety. However, the lack of reliable exposure data hinders meaningful analysis and interpretation. In this paper, we review the bicycle safety literature reporting different methods for measuring cycling exposure and discuss their findings. ⋯ The need to include exposure in bicycle safety research is increasingly recognized, but good exposure data are often lacking, which makes results hard to interpret and compare. Studies including exposure often use a retrospective research design, without including data on minor bicycle accidents, making it difficult to compare safety levels between age categories or against different types of infrastructure. Future research should focus more on children and adolescents, as this age group is a vulnerable population and is underrepresented in the existing literature.
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Walking is a popular form of physical activity associated with clear health benefits. Promoting safe walking for pedestrians requires evaluating the risk of pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions at specific roadway locations in order to identify where road improvements and other interventions may be needed. The objective of this analysis was to estimate the risk of pedestrian collisions at intersections and mid-blocks in Seattle, WA. ⋯ Locations with higher intersection density had a lower rate of collisions as did those in areas with higher residential property values. The novel spatiotemporal approach used that integrates road/crossing characteristics with surrounding neighborhood characteristics should help city agencies better identify high-risk locations for further study and analysis. Improving roads and making them safer for pedestrians achieves the public health goals of reducing pedestrian collisions and promoting physical activity.
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Traffic law enforcement sanctions can impact on road user behaviour through general and specific deterrence mechanisms. The manner in which specific deterrence can influence recidivist behaviour can be conceptualised in different ways. While any reduction in speeding will have road safety benefits, the ways in which a 'reduction' is determined deserves greater methodological attention and has implications for countermeasure evaluation more generally. ⋯ Additional exploratory analyses investigating potential influences of the severity of the index offence, offence history, and method of detection revealed mixed results. Access to additional data from various sources suggested that the main findings were not influenced by changes in speed enforcement activity, public awareness of penalty changes, or driving exposure during the study period. Study limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed with a view to promoting more extensive evaluations of penalty changes and better understanding of how such changes may impact on motorists' perceptions of enforcement and sanctions, as well as on recidivist behaviour.
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This paper probes the relationship between changes in the risk of apprehension for speeding in Norway and changes in the amount of speeding. The paper is based on a game-theoretic model of how the rate of violations and the amount of enforcement is determined by the interaction between drivers and the police. This model makes predictions both about how drivers will adapt to changes in the amount of enforcement (the more enforcement, the less violations) as well as how the police will adapt to changes in the rate of violations (the less violations, the less enforcement). ⋯ Testing the model rigorously is difficult, mainly because some of the relevant variables are not reliably measured and are endogenous. Two models were developed: one to identify sources of changes in the rate of violations, one to identify sources of changes in the amount of enforcement. The predictions of the game-theoretic model were supported, although the results were not statistically significant in the model of how the police adapt enforcement to changes in the rate of violations.