Assessing the Impacts of a Teleworking Policy on Crash Occurrence: The Case of Flanders, Belgium

Abstract

Travel demand management (TDM) consists of a variety of policy measures that affect the effectiveness of transportation systems by changing travel behavior. The primary objective of such TDM strategies is not to improve traffic safety, although their impact on traffic safety should not be neglected. The main purpose of this study is to simulate the traffic safety impact of conducting a teleworking scenario (i.e. 5% of the working population engages in teleworking) in the study area, Flanders, Belgium. Since TDM strategies are usually conducted at a geographically aggregated level, crash prediction models (CPMs) should also be developed at an aggregate level. Given that crash occurrences are often spatially heterogeneous and are affected by many spatial variables, the existence of spatial correlation in the data is also examined. The results indicate the necessity of accounting for the spatial correlation when developing crash prediction models. Therefore zonal crash prediction models (ZCPMs) within the Geographically Weighted Generalized Linear Modeling (GWGLM) framework are developed to incorporate the spatial variations in association between the number of crashes (NOCs)(including fatal, severe and slight injury crashes recorded between 2004 and 2007) and other explanatory variables. Different exposure, network and socio-demographic variables of 2200 traffic analysis zones (TAZs) are considered as predictors of crashes. An activity-based transportation model framework is adopted to produce detailed exposure metrics. This enables to conduct a more detailed and reliable assessment while TDM strategies are inherently modeled in the activity-based models. In this study, several ZCPMs with different severity levels and crash types are developed to predict the NOCs for both the null and the teleworking scenario. The models show a considerable traffic safety benefit of conducting the teleworking scenario due to its impact on the reduction of total Vehicle Kilometers Traveled (VKT) by 3.15%. Implementing the teleworking scenario is predicted to reduce the annual VKT by 1.426 billion and total NOCs to decline by 2.62%.