Influencing factors on vehicle-pedestrian crash severity of school-aged pedestrians

Abstract

Every year, about 19 percent of vehicle-pedestrian crashes in Melbourne metropolitan area, Australia, involves pedestrians with less than 18 years of age or school-aged pedestrians. This paper aims to identify contributing factors on vehicle-pedestrian crash severity of this age group. Reasonable walking distance to schools is applied in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to identify vehicle-pedestrian crashes around schools. Then Boosted Decision Tree (BDT) and Cross-Validation (CV) technique are applied to explore significant factors. Results show that the distance of pedestrians from school is a significant factor on vehicle-pedestrian crash severity for this age group. This result coul..