Understanding the influence factors and related causation of hazardous materials can improve hazardous materials drivers' safety awareness and help traffic professionals to develop effective countermeasures. This study investigates the statistical distribution characteristics, such as types of hazardous materials transportation accidents, driver properties, vehicle properties, environmental properties, road properties. In total, 343 data regarding hazardous materials accidents were collected from the chemical accident information network of China. An ordered logit regression (OLR) model is proposed to account for the unobserved heterogeneity across observations. Four independent variables, such as hazardous materials drivers' properties, vehicle properties, environmental properties, and road properties are employed based on the OLR model, an ordered multinomial logistic regression (MLR) is estimated the OLR model parameters. Both parameter estimates and odds ratio (OR) are employed to interpret the impact of influence factors on the severity of hazardous materials accidents. The model estimation results show that 10 factors such as violations, unsafe driving behaviors, vehicle faults, and so on are closely related to accidents severity of hazardous materials transportation. Furthermore, three enforcement countermeasures are proposed to prevent accidents when transporting hazardous materials.
Keywords: causation analysis; hazardous materials; influence factors; ordered logit model; traffic safety; transportation accident.