Graduation Year
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.S.C.E.
Degree Name
MS in Civil Engineering (M.S.C.E.)
Degree Granting Department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Major Professor
Fred L. Mannering, Ph.D.
Co-Major Professor
Pei-Sung Lin, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Zhenyu Wang, Ph.D.
Keywords
Pedestrian Injury Severities, Mixed Logit Model, Latent Class Logit Model
Abstract
Pedestrians are vulnerable road users because they do not have any protection while they walk. They are unlike cyclists and motorcyclists who often have at least helmet protection and sometimes additional body protection (in the case of motorcyclists with body-armored jackets and pants). In the US, pedestrian fatalities are increasing and becoming an ever larger proportion of overall roadway fatalities (NHTSA, 2016), thus underscoring the need to study factors that influence pedestrian-injury severity and potentially develop appropriate countermeasures. One of the critical elements in the study of pedestrian-injury severities is to understand how injuries vary across age and gender ‒ two elements that have been shown to be critical injury determinants in past research. In the current research effort, 4829 police-reported pedestrian crashes from Chicago in 2011 and 2012 are used to estimate multinomial logit, mixed logit, and latent class logit models to study the effects of age and gender on resulting injury severities in pedestrian crashes. The results from these model estimations show that the injury severity level for older males, younger males, older females, and younger females are statistically different. Moreover, the overall findings also show that older males and older females are more likely to have higher injury-severity levels in many instances (if a crash occurs on city streets, state maintained urban roads, the primary cause of the crash is failing to yield right-of way, pedestrian entering/ leaving/ crossing is not at intersection, road surface condition is dry, and road functional class is a local road or street). The findings suggest that well-designed and well-placed crosswalks, small islands in two-way streets, narrow streets, clear road signs, provisions for resting places, and wide, flat sidewalks all have the potential to result in lower pedestrian-injury severities across age/gender combinations.
Scholar Commons Citation
Raharjo, Tatok Raharjo, "The Effects of Age and Gender on Pedestrian Traffic Injuries: A Random Parameters and Latent Class Analysis" (2016). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6360
