An Assessment Method of Urban Traffic Crash Severity Considering Traveling Delay and Non-Essential Fuel Consumption of Third Parties

Urban traffic crashes may lead to only a few casualties, but may generate severe negative impacts on the surrounding traffic, such as evidently increasing traveling delay and non-essential fuel consumption of third parties (i.e., vehicles not involved in the crash). Such detrimental consequences of urban traffic crashes are usually ignored by the traditional crash severity evaluation approaches. Therefore, this study attempts to classify urban traffic crash severity by considering the traveling delay and non-essential fuel consumption of third parties in addition to casualties and property damages. Based on the losses of traveling delay and non-essential fuel consumption of third parties, the losses of crash casualties, and property damages, a comprehensive index of urban traffic crash severity was developed. Moreover, the thresholds of the proposed comprehensive index for urban crash severity classification were determined based on the crash data from 2013 to 2014 collected from Harbin, China. The developed comprehensive index was applied to a case study, which also compared the crash severity classification outcomes from the developed method and the current approach. The results indicate that the developed method of urban traffic crash severity classification is more reasonable than the existing approach. Such superiority of the proposed urban crash severity classification method is due to considering the traveling delay and non-essential fuel consumption of third parties caused by a crash.