Analysis of School Zone Crash Severities with an Equity Lens: A Random Parameters Modeling Approach

Because of the potentially higher loss of human years in collisions involving young children, school zone safety is a significant public health concern. Past studies have identified several factors that are associated with school zone crashes, including inadequate traffic controls, poor speed management, and lack of enforcement. However, school zone safety remains relatively unexplored as an equity issue. Toward that end, crash data about vulnerable road users (VRUs), (i.e., pedestrians/bicyclists) from elementary schools in Los Angeles County, California, U.S., were collected, alongside information about the proportion of students who were enrolled in the free and reduced cost meals program. The latter served as a proxy for the socioeconomic statuses of the schools’ neighborhoods. The severity outcomes of those VRU collisions were analyzed via the random parameters, or mixed, ordinal probit regression structure to gauge the impact of the crash-contributing factors on the injury severity risks. According to the results of this study, the socioeconomic status of the school’s neighborhood was found to induce mixed effects on the injury severity risk. As such, the results suggested that more detailed investigations on the interaction of the factors describing the crash characteristics with equity are required to propose appropriate road safety countermeasures. This is because the impact of the socioeconomic status of the schools on crash severity risk varied across the data.