Analysis of traffic accident size for Korean highway using structural equation models

Accident size can be expressed as the number of involved vehicles, the number of damaged vehicles, the number of deaths and/or the number of injured. Accident size is the one of the important indices to measure the level of safety of transportation facilities. Factors such as road geometric condition, driver characteristic and vehicle type may be related to traffic accident size. However, all these factors interact in complicate ways so that the interrelationships among the variables are not easily identified. A structural equation model is adopted to capture the complex relationships among variables because the model can handle complex relationships among endogenous and exogenous variables simultaneously and furthermore it can include latent variables in the model. In this study, we use 2649 accident data occurred on highways in Korea and estimate relationship among exogenous factors and traffic accident size. The model suggests that road factors, driver factors and environment factors are strongly related to the accident size.