RESEARCH ARTICLE
High and Low Deer-Vehicle Collision Roadway Sections - What Makes Them Different?
Chun Shao*, Ping Yi, Abdullah Alhomidan
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 87
Last Page: 92
Publisher ID: TOTJ-4-87
DOI: 10.2174/1874447801004010087
Article History:
Received Date: 1/11/2009Revision Received Date: 9/12/2009
Acceptance Date: 13/12/2009
Electronic publication date: 1/12/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
This paper studies deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) by examining roadway geometric and roadside characteristics in northeast Ohio. A total of 1,208 non-intersection crashes in rural highways have been investigated for three years (2001-2003), covering 173.5 miles of two-lane highways on which 46% of the crashes are DVCs. In order to find the main differences between the sections that showed high DVC rate and those with low or no crashes in the same highway, field surveys have been performed to collect necessary geometric and roadside information in support of the study. Data analysis has been performed to identify feature variables that are statistically significant in the high DVC sections.
The results of the analysis suggest that the distance between the wooded areas to the roadway, the percentage of the ditches, and the number of vertical curves are the most important factors that distinguish the high and low DVC sections. The probability of hitting a deer is three times as large if a farm is nearby. The result also shows that there is no association between high DVC and high run-off-road (ROR) crashes in the study area.