Weather and road environment’s influence on multi-vehicle crashes in Romania

Abstract The aim of this paper is to assess the weather and road environment’s influence on Multi Vehicle Crashes (MVC) in Romania. In order to capture the real effect of these factors, the road accidents recorded between the months of November and March of each year from 2013 to 2018 are analysed, as this is the period of each year when most of the meteorological phenomena relevant to our research are present. The analysed data set contains complex records of a number of 8,538 accidents which are assessed at the highly disaggregation level (individual), a type of analysis which is rarely found in the road safety studies. A Binary Multiple Logistic Regression (BMLR) is employed for explanatory purposes in order to estimate the probability of MVC. Road accidents that involve at least 3 vehicles are declared as MVC and the probability of their occurrence is labelled as “1”. The rest of the crashes in the data set are assigned the value “0” of the probability. The results of this research show that the highways have the highest risk of a MCV occurring as the odds values show and the sleet is the weather phenomena which highly increase the probability of having a MCV. These risk factors should be further researched in connection with other variables that relate to the driver and weather characteristics.