Estimating the occurrence of traffic accidents near school locations: A case study from Valencia (Spain) including several approaches

Abstract

Traffic safety around school locations is a topic of particular interest given the large number of vulnerable users, such as pedestrians or cyclists, that commute to them at certain times of the day. A dataset of traffic accidents recorded in Valencia (Spain) during 2014 and 2015 is analyzed in order to estimate the effects that school locations produce on traffic risk within their surroundings. The four typologies of school in this city according to the academic levels they offer (All-level, Preschool, Primary, Secondary) are distinguished and taken into consideration for the analysis. Two time windows comprising the starting time in the morning and the evening time once day school has ended are analyzed independently. Several statistical methods are used, including observed vs expected ratios, macroscopic conditional autoregressive modelling, logistic regression in the context of a case-control study design and risk modelling in relation to several school locations. The distances to each type of school and a set of environmental, traffic-related, demographic and socioeconomic covariates are employed for the analysis. The macroscopic modelling of accident counts and the modelling of risk as a function of the distance to each type of school serves to confirm that proximity to a school has an effect on the incidence of traffic accidents in particular time windows. Specifically, school types coexisting in Valencia show differential behaviour in this regard. In addition, several covariates have displayed a positive (bus stop density, complex intersections, main road length) and negative (land use entropy) association with accident counts in the time windows investigated. Finally, the definition of a case-control study design enabled us to observe some differences undetected by the macroscopic approaches that would require further research.

Keywords: Case–control study; Conditional autoregressive model; Risk in relation to point sources; School zones; Traffic safety analysis.