An Exploratory Analysis of Fatal Vehicle Crashes in Urban and Rural Kansas in Relation to Identified Golder Hour Gaps in Hospital Coverage

The state of Kansas is a relatively rural state with a majority of highway/interstate miles through farmland and low populated areas. These rural areas can be hot spots for crashes to occur and the lack of hospitals and emergency response nearby can make these types of crashes turn deadly. Few studies have been done on this topic especially for the state of Kansas. As the Department of Transportation is pushing to the “Drive to Zero” goal, pinpointing the harmful factors to indicate where improvements are needed to reduce the number, and severity of crashes is an important first step. Using fatal crash data collected by KDOT between 2016 and 2019, this study correlated the common factors and trends found in all crashes. These data were then targeted to fatal crashes in rural and urban areas, analyzed to find the common variables that proved to be significant, and modeled in two separate logistic regressions.