Climate change modeling and the weather-related road accidents in Canada

The objective of this research is to study the impact of climate change on the hazardous weather-related road accidents in the New Brunswick, Canada. We develop an Exposure to Weather-Accident Severity (EWAS) index multiplying accident and weather severity. The Negative Binomial Regression and Poisson regression models are applied to estimate the spatial-temporal relationship between the EWAS index and weather-related explanatory variables of road accidents. The regression results show that the surface-weather condition, weather, driver's gender, weather-driver's age, weather-driver's experience, and weather-vehicle's age have strong positive correlation with the EWAS index, while the surface-road alignment and surface-road characteristics have negative relationship with the EWAS index. The climate change model also indicates that the number of accidents declines during snowy and freezing days-most people stay at home and those who travel extra cautious-accidents do occur. The study suggests that the Road Safety Strategy 2015 of the Transport Canada should take a holistic approach to help minimize the incidences of severe road accident during the normal as well as hazardous weather conditions.