Investigating the Role of Human Factors, Vehicle Safety Features, and Types of Crashes on Injury Severity in Kansas
The Safe System Approach emphasizes designing countermeasures with an in-depth understanding of the human factors associated with traffic crashes. At the same time, it is important to investigate the role of better safety metrics, including the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) crash-worthiness and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA safety ratings, in preventing serious injury crashes. Since crash injury severity is affected by multiple factors, it is important to account for vehicle crash worthiness (as defined by the IIHS), human factors, and the environment (network and the detailed sequence of most-harmful events as well as the types of crashes: rear-end, side-swipe, head-on) within an integrated modeling framework. A comprehensive crash severity model integrated with ArcGIS StoryMap will enable the Bureau of Transportation Safety of the Kansas Department of Transportation to promote effective safety countermeasures and create behavioral and instructional safety campaigns for drivers of various vehicle models. The research aims to develop a crash severity model accounting for vehicle attributes (make, model, year) and crash attributes (collision types, sequence of harmful events) with the ten years of crash data from Kansas (2012 – 2023) using the state crash database (the data can be extended to the most recent year based on availability). The goals of the project are as follows: 1. Perform statistical analyses of the relationship between accident type and vehicle year, model, and manufacturer using ten-year crash data; 2. Investigate possible correlations between vehicle attributes (make, model, year) and crash severity (sensitivity and cluster analyses); 3. Compare the percentage of vehicle types registered in Kansas to the percentage of crashes by vehicle types (representation ratio); 4. Compare findings of the estimated injury severity model with crash-worthiness scores by the IIHS. Examine the performance of certain safety features that may have been available within the vehicle types. The option to leverage NHTSA ratings data for comparison purposes will also be explored.
Language
- English
Project
- Status: Active
- Funding: $80,995.00
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Contract Numbers:
K-TRAN: KSU-26-5
RE-0923-01
C2255
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Sponsor Organizations:
Kansas Department of Transportation
Eisenhower State Office Building
700 SW Harrison Street
Topeka, KS United States 66603-3754 - Performing Organizations: Manhattan, KS United States 66506
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Principal Investigators:
Aziz, Husain
- Start Date: 20251001
- Expected Completion Date: 20270331
- Actual Completion Date: 0
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Crash injuries; Crash types; Human factors; Vehicle safety
- Identifier Terms: ArcGIS Network Analyst
- Geographic Terms: Kansas
- Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01976244
- Record Type: Research project
- Source Agency: Kansas Department of Transportation
- Contract Numbers: K-TRAN: KSU-26-5, RE-0923-01, C2255
- Files: RIP, STATEDOT
- Created Date: Jan 13 2026 4:16PM