A mixed generalized ordered response model for examining pedestrian and bicyclist injury severity level in traffic crashes

Abstract

This paper proposes an econometric structure for injury severity analysis at the level of individual accidents that recognizes the ordinal nature of the categories in which injury severity are recorded, while also allowing flexibility in capturing the effects of explanatory variables on each ordinal category and allowing heterogeneity in the effects of contributing factors due to the moderating influence of unobserved factors. The model developed here, referred to as the mixed generalized ordered-response logit (MGORL) model, generalizes the standard ordered-response models used in the extant literature for injury severity analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first such formulation to be proposed and applied in the econometric literature in general, and in the safety analysis literature in particular. The MGORL model is applied to examine non-motorist injury severity in accidents in the USA, using the 2004 General Estimates System (GES) database. The empirical findings emphasize the inconsistent results obtained from the standard ordered response model. An important policy result from our analysis is that the general pattern and relative magnitude of elasticity effects of injury severity determinants are similar for pedestrians and bicyclists. The analysis also suggests that the most important variables influencing non-motorist injury severity are the age of the individual (the elderly are more injury-prone), the speed limit on the roadway (higher speed limits lead to higher injury severity levels), location of crashes (those at signalized intersections are less severe than those elsewhere), and time-of-day (darker periods lead to higher injury severity).