Citation

Xu J, Wali B, Li X, Yang J. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019; 16(19): e16193542.

Affiliation

School of Transportation, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China. jackyyoung@126.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph16193542

PMID

31546688

Abstract

Large-scale truck-involved crashes attract great attention due to their increasingly severe injuries. The majority of those crashes are passenger vehicle-truck collisions. This study intends to investigate the critical relationship between truck/passenger vehicle driver's intentional or unintentional actions and the associated injury severity in passenger vehicle-truck crashes. A random-parameter model was developed to estimate the complicated associations between the risk factors and injury severity by using a comprehensive Virginia crash dataset. The model explored the unobserved heterogeneity while controlling for the driver, vehicle, and roadway factors. Compared with truck passengers, occupants in passenger vehicles are six times and ten times more likely to suffer minor injuries and serious/fatal injuries, respectively. Importantly, regardless of whether passenger vehicle drivers undertook intentional or unintentional actions, the crashes are more likely to associate with more severe injury outcomes. In addition, crashes occurring late at night and in early mornings are often correlated with more severe injuries. Such associations between explanatory factors and injury severity are found to vary across the passenger vehicle-truck crashes, and such significant variations of estimated parameters further confirmed the validity of applying the random-parameter model. More implications based on the results and suggestions in terms of safe driving are discussed.

Language: en

Keywords

freight transportation; injury severity; ordered probit; passenger vehicle–truck; random parameters; unsafe driver actions