Long Tail Theory in Road Safety Reconstruction
Wei-yang Wu · 2014
The Long Tail theory is a new theory with the rise of the Internet. As the long tail theory says, the common market share - which is occupied by these products where demand and sales are not high - can be compared to the market share of mainstream products, and even greater when the commodity storage space and channel are broad enough. In the field of traffic safety, people tend to focus on the segments where the indicators are relatively high, such as accident black spots and at intersections. At the same time, they tend to ignore most of the remaining segments at which less accidents or even no accidents occur. Under the inspiration of the long tail theory, the sum of accident numbers in these segments and the needs of safety reconstruction are also very high. As networks develop (especially mobile networks), the use of crowdsourcing models helps identify potential accident segments, reduces the cost, and increases the overall traffic road security. Road reconstruction of accident blackspots or the replanning of intersections usually have significant costs, and those segments with fewer accidents cost less. A cost-effective indicator of security is put forward, namely that when the ratio of the safety reconstruction effect before and after costs are relatively high, we should maintain these high cost-effective indicator segments to improve overall road network traffic safety. If we are able to solve traffic safety problems of these smaller segments at less cost and higher efficiency, it will also greatly reduce traffic accidents and increase road safety performance. To some extent, we must pay attention to the long tail segment.