Citation

Fountas G, Olowosegun A, Basbas S. Safety (Basel) 2022; 8(2): e29.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/safety8020029

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

School travel has been a significant source of safety concerns for children, parents, and public authorities. It will continue to be a source of concerns as long as severe accidents continue to emerge during pupils' commute to school. This study provides an empirical analysis of the factors influencing the injury severities of the accidents that occurred on trips to or from school in Scotland. Using 9-year data from the STATS19 public database, random parameter binary logit models with allowances for heterogeneity in the means were estimated in order to investigate injury severities in urban and rural areas. The results suggested that factors such as the road type, lighting conditions, vehicle type, and age of the driver or casualty constitute the common determinants of injury severities in both urban and rural areas. Single carriageways and vehicles running on heavy oil engines were found to induce opposite effects in urban and rural areas, whereas the involvement of a passenger car in the accident decomposed various layers of unobserved heterogeneity for both area types. The findings of this study can inform future policy interventions with a focus on traffic calming in the proximity of schools.

Keywords: SR2S

Language: en

Keywords

accidents; binary logit; heterogeneity in the means; injury severities; random parameters; school travel