The joint effect of weather and lighting conditions on injury severities of single-vehicle accidents

This study seeks to identify and analyze variations in the effect of contributing factors on injury severities of single-vehicle accidents across various lighting and weather conditions. To that end, injury-severity data from single-vehicle, injury accidents occurred in Scotland, United Kingdom in 2016 and 2017 are statistically modeled. Upon the conduct of likelihood ratio tests, separate models of accident injury severities are estimated for various combinations of weather and lighting conditions taking also into account the presence and operation of roadside lighting infrastructure. To account for the possibility of unobserved regimes underpinning the injury-severity mechanism, the zero-inflated hierarchical ordered probit approach with correlated disturbances is employed. The approach also relaxes the fixed threshold restriction of the traditional ordered probability models and captures systematic unobserved variations between the underlying regimes. The model estimation results show that a wide range of accident, vehicle, driver, trip and location characteristics have varying impacts on injury severities when different weather and lighting conditions are jointly considered. Even though several factors are identified to have overall consistent effects on injury severities, the simultaneous impact of unfavorable weather and lighting conditions is found to introduce significant variations, especially in the effect of vehicle- and driver-specific characteristics. The findings of this study can be leveraged in vehicle-to-infrastructure or in-vehicle communication technologies that can assist drivers in their responses against hazardous environmental conditions