Impact of traffic Enforcement on Traffic Safety

Abstract

Motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) have a huge cost to society in terms of death, injury and property damage. The cost of fatal MVCs alone is estimated at US $44 billion per year. Among many confounding factors, traffic citations as an element that may reduce MVC frequency are not well understood, and most research carried out to date has evaluated the effects of the total number of citations on the number of MVCs. However, certain types of citations may be more likely to reduce the number of MVCs, whereas other types are not very effective. This research was set out to examine the impact of different types of traffic citations on MVCs on two hazardous main US highways in Wyoming US-30 and US-26. A negative binomial modeling technique was implemented by exploiting 4 years of crash and citations data to identify the causal impacts of traffic citations on crash frequency by incorporating traffic and geometric features. The modeling results showed that higher numbers of speeding and seat belt citations reduce the number of crashes significantly. These findings are the results of law enforcement efforts along the highways. Traffic count and the number of horizontal curves were found to significantly increase the number of MVCs.