Exploring spatio-temporal effects in traffic crash trend analysis

- Showcase that both spatial and temporal correlations are critical in crash frequency modeling.
- Present the importance of temporal component selection in spatio-temporal modeling.
- Use the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) to estimate Bayesian spatio-temporal models.

Unobserved heterogeneity produced by spatial and temporal correlations of crashes often needs to be captured in crash frequency modeling. Although many studies have included either spatial or temporal effects in crash frequency modeling, only a limited number of studies have considered both. This study addresses the limitations of existing studies by exploring multiple models that best fit the spatial and temporal correlations. In this study, we used Bayesian spatio-temporal models to investigate regional crash frequency trends, and explored the effects of omitting spatial or temporal trends in spatio-temporal correlated data. The fast Bayesian inference approach, integrated nested Laplace approximation, was used to estimate parameters. It was found that fatal crashes showed decreasing trends in all Iowa counties from 2006 to 2015, but the decreasing rates varied by counties. Among all the covariates investigated, only vehicle miles traveled (VMT) was significant. None of the socio-economic or weather indicators were found to be significant in the presence of VMT. Both spatial and temporal effects were found to be important, and they were responsible for both over dispersion and zero inflation in the crash data. In addition, spatial effects played a more important role than did temporal effects in the studied dataset, but temporal component selection was still important in spatio-temporal modeling.