Occupant injury severities in hybrid-vehicle involved crashes: A random parameters approach with heterogeneity in means and variances

Publication date: September 2017 Source:Analytic Methods in Accident Research, Volume 15 Author(s): Puttipan Seraneeprakarn, Shuaiqi Huang, Venkataraman Shankar, Fred Mannering, Narayan Venkataraman, John Milton Differences in hybrid and non-hybrid vehicle design, and potential differences in driver-related behavior among owners of these vehicle types, can potentially have interesting implications for safety-related policies. To study possible differences in hybrid and non-hybrid occupant injury severities in motor vehicle crashes, this paper uses a sample of hybrid-vehicle-involved crashes and estimates a mixed logit model of the resulting injury level of the most severely injured occupant in the crash, while accounting for possible heterogeneity in the means and variances of model parameters. A total of 2015 crashes in Washington State, involving at least one hybrid vehicle in the 5-year period from January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2010 were analyzed. The data included crash information regarding occupants, vehicles, environmental conditions at the time of the crash, hybrid and non-hybrid vehicle attributes, crash-contributing circumstances for both hybrid and non-hybrid involved vehicles, collision type and crash location information relating to intersections, functional class of the highway, and highway curvature. Model estimation results show that a wide range of variables influence the most severely injured occupant, and that the number-of-occupants parameter and...
Source: Analytic Methods in Accident Research - Category: Accident Prevention Source Type: research