Bus crash risk evaluation: An adjusted framework and its application in a real network

Authors

Benedetto Barabino
Michela Bonera
Giulio Maternini
Alessandro Olivo
Fabio Porcu

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2021

Subject Area

mode - bus, place - europe, planning - methods, planning - safety/accidents, operations - performance, operations - reliability, organisation - management

Keywords

Bus safety, Bus crashes, Risk analysis, ISO 39001:2012

Abstract

Greater attention to bus safety can lead to relevant benefits for public transport companies in terms of higher service performance, reliability, and lower insurance costs. Therefore, measuring the crash risk on bus routes provides an opportunity to improve the safety performance of transit operators. Previous research has explored the effects of many factors regarding the frequency and severity of bus crashes, whereas only a handful of studies have defined some crash risk indexes. Conversely, to the best of our knowledge, almost no research has been done regarding the crash risk in the bus transit network that integrates frequency, severity, and the exposure factors. This paper proposes a new framework to assess the crash risk for each transit bus route by the integration of safety factors, prediction models and risk methods. More precisely, this framework identifies several safety factors and specifies the risk components in terms of frequency, severity and exposure factors that may affect bus crashes. Then, it models their relationships to build a bus crash risk function. Lastly, according to the values returned by the previous function, the crash risk for each route is computed and a safety performance ranking for each route is provided. The feasibility of this framework is demonstrated in a real case study by using bus crash data provided by a mid-sized Italian bus operator. The findings show that transit managers could implement this framework in a road traffic safety management system to evaluate the risk of crashes on routes, monitor the safety performance of each route and qualify each route according to recent safety norms.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Accident Analysis and Prevention Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00014575

Recommended Citation

Barabino, B., Bonera, M., Maternini, G., Olivo, A., & Porcu, F. (2021). Bus crash risk evaluation: An adjusted framework and its application in a real network. Accident Analysis and Prevention, Vol. 159, 106258.