Complex Impacts of Traffic Citations on Road Safety

Abstract

Wyoming has one of the highest fatality rates and lowest enforcement rates in the U.S. Thus, this study was conducted to see if there is any link between various citation types on the equivalent property damage only (EPDO) crashes, while taking into account interaction terms between various crashes and citation characteristics. To achieve the objective, we disaggregated the citations data into their related types, while aggregating the crash dataset across each segment through the Eastern direction of the interstate 80 in Wyoming. The results highlighted that there are important relations between types of crashes and related citations. For instance, it was found that there are (1) significant interaction terms between driving-too-fast-for-condition citations and underride crashes, (2) total number of commercial citations and commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes, and (3) between seatbelt citations and seatbelt-related crashes, highlighting, possibly, that the performance of the highway patrol was adjusted based on the specific roadway concerns, or there is indeed a significant link between related citation and crash types. While conducting the model with no interaction term, the results of comparison highlighted that the model erroneously highlight positive associations between citation types and the EPDO crashes. This is one of the earliest studies that considered disaggregated citation data and aggregated them with the crash data to highlight the important relationship between the citations and crashes.

Keywords

• citation
• crash severity
• negative binomial reduced rank model
• traffic safety
• interaction terms