The effect of traffic and road characteristics on road safety: A review and future research direction

Understanding factors affecting road accidents is an important area in road safety research. This paper provides a review of the factors, with specific focus on traffic and road related factors mainly for car accidents on major roads. This paper also offers an overview of road safety theories that explain how and why these factors affect road traffic accidents. This paper offers the road safety community with a better understanding of road accidents and aids in developing suitable methods and policies for road safety improvement. Several factors most notably: speed, congestion, and road horizontal curvature were found to have mixed effects on road safety and need further examination. Future research directions on the effect of factors are also developed most notably improving the quality of data, exploring the factors in developing counties and rural areas, and employing advanced statistical models. There is also a need to further investigate issues relating to the effect of speed and congestion on road accidents, whether curvature improves road safety, and the use of more sophisticated statistical models so as to better understand the effect of factors on road accidents. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.