Investigation of driver injury severities in rural single-vehicle crashes under rain conditions using mixed logit and latent class models

Due to limited visibility and low skid resistance on road surface, single-vehicle crashes under rain conditions, especially those occurred in rural areas, are more likely to result in driver incapacitating injuries and fatalities. A three-year crash dataset including all rural single-vehicle crashes under rain conditions from 2012 to 2014 in four South Central states, i.e., Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, are selected in this paper to analyze the impact factors on driver injury severity. The mixed logit model (MLM) and the latent class model (LCM) are developed on the same dataset. Several parsimony indices, e.g., AIC and BIC, and as well as McFadden pseudo r-squared, are calculated for all the models to evaluate their respective performance. Results show that choosing the uniform distribution as the prior for random parameters could better improve the goodness-of-fit of the MLM than using normal and lognormal distributions. In addition, the two-class LCM also shows superiority when compared to three- and four-class LCMs. Finally, a careful comparison between these two models is conducted, and the results indicate that the LCM has a slightly better performance in analyzing the aforementioned dataset in this study. Model estimation results show that curve, on grade, signal control, multiple lanes, pickup, straight, drug/alcohol impaired, and seat belt not used can significantly increase the probability of incapacitating injuries and fatalities for drivers in the two models. On the other hand, wet, male, semi-trailer, and young can significantly decrease the probability of incapacitating injuries and fatalities for drivers. This study provides an insightful understanding of the effects of these attributes on rural single-vehicle crashes under rain conditions and beneficial references for developing effective countermeasures for severe injury prevention.