Characterization of traffic accidents for urban road safety

Abstract

Transit crashes are a serious social problem for any country, with a significant loss of human lives and economic consequences that are difficult to quantify. This article proposes a characterization of the transit crash rate for urban road safety using time series. A quantitative descriptive study was conducted, characterizing the variables of each crash extracted from the National Traffic Agency of Ecuador (NTA); the data were processed at a descriptive and predictive level for the city of Guayaquil. The first step was an exploration of the scientific interest of the topic with the processing of bibliographic data taken from Scopus and Web of Science articles. Among the results obtained, there is a growing trend of research related to the evaluation of traffic crash through applied statistics. Every day, approximately 155 people die as a result of a traffic crash. In addition, traffic crashes are analyzed based on three indicators: number of crashes, injuries and onsite fatalities. Finally, an adequate performance is found, with very few differences in the forecast of incidents using three times series models, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). It is expected that this study will be valuable for data analysts and decision makers at the security level to reduce human losses related to these events in urban cities with similar characteristics to the analyzed cases.