Abstract
This research was done with a view to improving the analysis and comparison of traffic safety records between countries and/or regions and motorways within a country ... and that by showing the importance of AADT in revealing unsuspected confounders. The work was carried out by analyzing government safety statistics using statistical and graphical techniques to compare countries, regions and motorways for a better understanding of crash causation and mitigation.
The graphical presentation of AADT against roadway fatality rates has shown that mental distraction* is the precipitating cause of all crashes. (*The author calls it Absent-Minded Professor Syndrome or AMPS.) The strong 60yr correlation between AADT and the fatality rate shown for the UK in his FISITA Budapest paper has been repeated here for West Germany (albeit for a shorter time period and using some estimated data points) as encouragement for all countries to do the same in the interest of using science to guide their active safety efforts. A graphical presentation of AADT against fatal collisions per VKmT for eight Ontario motorways shows that AADT explains varying rates for motorways of essentially identical infrastructure and speed limits. The author, and other researchers, had assumed that the strong reductions in fatality rates, in every industrialized country, from the early ‘70’s to the early ‘90’s, was due to passive safety improvements. This paper provides further proof that most of the annual reduction was due to increasing AADT. Because of the driver concentration increase as traffic density increases comparative truth can only be found after calculating AADT.
KEYWORDS: AADT, traffic safety, inter- and intra-country comparisons