Abstract
According to NHTSA, traffic accidents cost the United States billions of U.S. dollars each year. Intersection accidents alone accounted for 23% of the 32,675 motor crash deaths in 2014. With the advent of the largest naturalistic driving data set in the United States collected by the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study project, this study performs a crash-only analysis to identify driver-, vehicle-, and roadway-related factors that affect the driving risk at different location types using a machine learning tool. The study then analyzes the most important factors obtained from the machine learning analysis to identify how they affect crash risk. The results, in order of importance of variables, were driver behavior, locality, lane occupied, alignment, and through travel lanes. Also, drivers who violated traffic signals were four times more likely to be involved in a crash than drivers who did not. Those who violated stop signs were two times more likely to be involved in crashes than those who did not. Drivers performing visual-manual (VM) tasks at uncontrolled intersections were 2.7 times more likely to be involved in crashes than those who did not engage in these tasks. At nonintersections, drivers who performed VM tasks were 3.4 times more likely to be involved in crashes than drivers who did not. These findings add to the evidence that the establishment of safety awareness programs geared toward intersection safety is imperative.
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