Where are the most dangerous road locations in Hong Kong?

Traffic casualties and fatalities are some negative social impacts of the transport sector. Promoting road safety requires a thorough understanding of the spatial characteristics of traffic crashes, hence enabling us to devise effective countermeasures. In a lot of countries from different parts of the world, there are strong initiatives to achieve the "Vision Zero" objective. This study offers a new spatial analytical method, called "Hotzone methodology", to identify dangerous road sections. The newly developed add-in for detecting these hotzones will help policymakers to implement effective corrective measures.

• Based on the hotspot analysis (Junction Blacksites), we can identify specific road intersections of a relatively high number of traffic crashes. However, dangerous road locations do not only include road junctions (i.e. points). There are also some road sections (i.e. lines) that are quite dangerous and require corrective measures. An illustrative example is that almost no hotspots are identified in highways.
• In the past several years, there are several major incidents of traffic crashes along road sections outside the traffic hotspots. The pictures below demonstrate several serious traffic crash locations that are not identified before. Therefore, it is important to identify the dangerous road sections in order to devise preventive measures in advance, and to further reduce the number of traffic crashes and promote road safety.

• Where are the most dangerous road sections in Hong Kong?
• How can we use GIS techniques to develop a systematic and consistent methodology of identifying dangerous locations?
• What are the environmental features of the identified road sections?
• What feasible countermeasures can be implemented to reduce the traffic crashes of the identified road locations?

In this project, we utilise the Hong Kong traffic road crash data in 2017. The locations of road crashes are geovalidated before the analysis. All results are generated by the Hotzone Generation Add-in.

To summarise, this project helps answer the four research questions:

• Where are the most dangerous road sections in Hong Kong? There are different types of dangerous traffic hot zones in Hong Kong, including (i) highways and trunk roads, (ii) around road junctions and (iii) urban and suburban roads maily with vehicular traffic. Some of these locations are not detected by the hotspot methodology before.
• How can we use GIS techniques to develop a systematic and consistent methodology of identifying dangerous locations? The Hotzone Generation Add-in integrates the three-step approach and provides an efficient and consistent analysis of the traffic crashes in Hong Kong. Specific road sections with a high number of traffic crashes can be identified.
• What are the environmental features of the identified road sections? What feasible countermeasures can be implemented to reduce the traffic crashes of the identified road locations? A wide range of environmental features of the identified road sections are observed, including roads of heavy traffic flow and fast speed with a few intersections, roads with a high level of pedestrian-vehicular conflicts and some roads of high junction density. This suggests that place-specific / road-based analysis helps policy makers to devise more effective countermeasures to improve road safety. A combination of feasible engineering and enforcement measures are suggested. Future research can further improve the accuracy by incorporating traffic crashes of different years.