Outline of Causal Theory of Traffic Conflicts and Collisions
Gary A. Davis, John Hourdos, Hui Yun Xiong · Transportation Research Board 87th Annual MeetingTransportation Research Board · 2008
Using recent developments in causal analysis, we construct a minimal model capable of rigorously representing traffic conflicts and crashes, and use this model to derive relationships between these. We obtain an earlier relationship as a special case, but find that the problem of predicting crashes from conflicts becomes more complicated when a road user can select from a range of evasive actions. Crashes and conflicts can both be treated as arising from non-random sampling from the set the background conditions, but with possibly different sampling weights, so that there is no guarantee that the events sampled in a conflict study will be representative of those occurring in crashes. We then identify conditions which a conflict should satisfy in order to have background conditions similar to those of crashes.