• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.103-111
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• 2011

To evaluate highway safety countermeasures or identify high risk sites, the expected crashes for a site (or segment) have been estimated using the panel crash data. Past studies show that two different methods can be employed to estimate the expected crashes: observed crash based method and empirical Bayes (EB) method. This study conducts a simulation study to analyze how the estimation errors of the two estimates are affected by the different structures of the panel crash data and the presence of the change in safety over time. The results disclose that the estimation errors of the observed crash based estimates (i.e. the mean observed crash and comparative parallel estimate) are always greater than those of the EB estimates regardless of the structure of the panel crash data and the presence of the change in safety over time. Thus, it is highly recommended that the EB method be used in the study of traffic safety to obtain more reliable estimates for the expected crashes. In addition, this study corroborates that the estimation errors of the two estimates decrease as the analysis periods increase if safety does not change over time. Hence, it is also recommended that the 1-year analysis period used for identifying high risk sites in Korea be extended to produce more efficient estimates of the time-constant expected crashes.