[Case Study] Road Safety: Data Analytics: Montgomery County, MD

In this work, we analyze road safety with an integration of multiple data sources on multiple scales. As a case study, we consider three datasets, including the nationwide Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the statewide traffic crashes in Maryland (MDCrash), and the countywide traffic violations in Montgomery County, MD (MoCoVio).

• “Multiscale crash analysis: A case study of integrating FARS, Maryland’s crash data, and Montgomery County’s traffic violation data,” in Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 2018.
  

  @InProceedings{xie2018multiscale,
  title={Multiscale crash analysis: A case study of integrating {FARS}, {Maryland}'s crash data, and {Montgomery County}'s traffic violation data},
  author={Xie, Xiao-Feng and Wang, Zun-Jing},
  Booktitle = {Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting},
  number={18-2283},
  Address = {Washington, DC},
  LNK={https://trid.trb.org/View/1495254},
  PDF={http://www.wiomax.com/team/xie/paper/TRB18.pdf},
  year={2018}
  }

We explore practical values of the multiple data integration on road crash analysis. The crash risk patterns extracted from data fusion is shown to be rather valuable. By identifying determinant risk factors in the patterns, we can better understand the effects of other risk factors. In addition, conditional risk matrix can be computed from data integration to measure the probability of the injury levels and to evaluate the impact of each individual risk factor on injuries. Finally, we conduct a multi-source data integration to discover the safety factors for pedestrians, where we obtain temporal patterns from FARS but acquire spatial patterns from the traffic crash and violation data. The results indicate that, in comparison with only using FARS, integrating multiple data has the power of showing more insights of the patterns on risk factors for traffic crashes, which allows us to not only better optimize limited resources but also realize more effective countermeasures for enhancing road safety.