New Zealand Statistical Association
2004 Conference

Submitted Talks

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Robert Davies
Statistics Research Associates

Crash Risk and Road Surface Characteristics

New Zealand's state highway system is surveyed annually with surface and pavement characteristics such as roughness and skid resistance together with geometry data such as curvature being measured at either 10 or 20 metre intervals. We also have estimates of the traffic density on each road segment and the locations of reported injury crashes. The analysis described in this paper attempts to relate the crash rate to the road characteristics using a modification of Poisson regression. Particular problems that need to be handled include the volume of data, the uncertainties in the location of the crashes, and some questions about the accuracy of some of the data. Nevertheless, there seem to be some credible and interesting results.