Introduction
- This is for information about my research interest in Road Safety as an applied computational geography subject focussing on geographical aspects of road accident incidence.
- Contents:
Road Accident Geography
- There is geographical variation in road accident incidence.
- The variation is spatial and temporal and related to changes in intrinsic risk and risk exposure.
- Whilst there are road accidents there is a clear imperative for geographic analysis of road accident incidence that seeks to explain the spatial variation over time.
- "Road traffic accidents are an important cause of death and serious injury in developed societies. The pattern of incidence has marked spatial and temporal regularities and the geography of road accidents can inform us better about the nature of the problem and the extent to which traditional solutions may or may not reduce the level of accidents." (Whitelegg, 1986)
- Road accidents, especially those that involve personal injury or death are an undeniable problem.
- In the 1990's it was estimated that 30-40% of all fatal accidents in Britain were road accidents.
- In 1997, the cost of road accidents (including; hospital costs, damage to property and vehicles, police and insurance costs, lost output, and a notional sum for pain and suffering) was an estimated £14,814 million (ROSPA, 2000).
- The number of deaths from road accidents, compared to other causes, is very high, especially for some age groups (Chin and Quek, 1997; Whitelegg, 1986).
- Research themes:
- How has the geographical variation in accident rates been researched to date?
- The nature of road accident incidence, the motivation for road safety research, and an introduction to various road safety and road accident issues.
- A geographical approach to analysing Stats19 data.
- An initial exploration, via statistics and tables, of Stats19 road accident incidence data for Britain from the start of 1992 to the end of 1999.
Blog
- 2010 As part of GEOG5160, Nawaf Alotaibi and Stuart Jackson each undertake a Masters dissertation thesis on this subject
- 2009-03 Set up a Road e-Research Worksite on the NCeSS Sakai Portal
- History
- In 1997 I completed a masters in GIS with a dissertation titled "An analysis of spatial pattern of road accidents in Leeds using GAM/K and GEM". GAM/K and GEM are spatial analysis methods being developed in the Smart Spatial Analysis Project by my supervisor Stan Openshaw and Ian Turton
- In March 2000, I began reading for a PhD that had a road safety focus.
- I was supervised by Ian Turton, Andy Evans and Oliver Carsten
- The research was mainly concerned with developing Geographically Weighted Statistics for identifying, visualising and investigating the distribution or clustering of personal injury road accidents as recorded for Great Britain in Stats19 data:
- The key challenge was to review existing tools and develop new tools to assist the analysis of spatial-temporal-attribute distributions.
- The thesis aimed to address the question: How well can models predict road accident incidence for arbitrary geographical regions?
- I thought about testing the following hypotheses:
- The best models of accident likelihood are stochastic.
- At higher levels of spatial and or temporal resolution there are many exogenous geographical variables that are correlated with personal injury road accident incidence.
- There is no way of proving any causal link between personal injury road accident incidence and correlated variables.
- The work focused on the development of tools to analyse changes in the spatial pattern over time.
- I hoped that the tools and the results they generated would provide a basis for further efforts to improve road safety.
References
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