Road accident risk analysis of at- and near-port areas reflecting regional heterogeneous characteristics

In port cities, road traffic safety management should consider various types of cargo that will shift in the trucks and containers. This applies not only in the case of ‘at port’ areas within a 2-km radius but also ‘near-port’ areas within a 4–8-km radius. This is important for traffic safety because the crash severity can be high as there are many trucks to the ports that can cause large-scale crashes. Therefore, to prepare traffic safety management strategies for port city, it is necessary to identify crash risk factors that affect the crash severity. This study developed a two-stage road crash severity model of ‘at-port’ and ‘near-port’ regions using a support vector machine and a Bayesian multinomial model. Additionally, a severity model suitable for Korean ports was proposed that considered spatial heterogeneity in the Bayesian multilevel multinomial model. Findings derived from this study can be used for policy development to increase road traffic safety in port cities. ‘This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled [Accident Risk Analysis of At and Near-Port Areas Reflecting Regional Heterogeneous Characteristics] presented at [The 11th International Conference on Logistics and Maritime Systems, Korea, 4-7 September 2023]’.