Road accidents and rainfall in a large Australian city

Abstract

We investigate the impact of rainfall on daily road accidents in the metropolitan area of Melbourne, Australia, over 1987-2002. Our analysis from several viewpoints of the accident count, which has been normalised for variation in traffic volume, indicated that the effect of rainfall is multifaceted. Owing to a large non-linear trend a subdivision into three epochs (1987-1991, 1992-1996 and 1997-2002) was made. Nominal daytime and nighttime as well as 3 h raw counts were available for the first two epochs only. Generally, the effect of rainfall across the epochs shows a tendency for larger values in autumn with smaller values in spring. For the daily, daytime and nighttime cases there is an ..