Abstract:
This study investigated the main factors affecting the severity of injury to pedestrians in taxi–pedestrian crashes on urban arterial roads. Video data recorded by an in-car black box were used. Because the video data provided direct crash observation, they were more reliable than the crash data, and video images and speed profiles retrieved from the black box were advantageous for safety studies. For analysis of the black box data, this study defined new explanatory variables that affected injury severity; these variables could not have been identified by the conventional method, which was based on crash reports. A multiple-indicator and multiple-cause model was used to investigate the relationship between the explanatory variables and injury severity. A total of 484 taxi–pedestrian crash scenes over 2 years was used for the multivariate analysis in the city of Incheon, South Korea. The crash characteristics most strongly associated with increased crash severity were failure by the pedestrian to watch for approaching vehicles, jaywalking by the pedestrian, the pedestrian being elderly, excessive vehicle speed, failure by the driver to immediately stop, limited driver vision, and nighttime. This study emphasized the potential of individualized black box video recording data for crash severity analysis and investigation of the causal factors of crashes.
