School zone was introduced in 1993 and kept expanding until now continuously. In the meantime, school zone improvement project has been evaluated as having a positive effect on reducing traffic accidents. However, it was pointed out that the improveme...
School zone was introduced in 1993 and kept expanding until now continuously. In the meantime, school zone improvement project has been evaluated as having a positive effect on reducing traffic accidents. However, it was pointed out that the improvement project was overly costly per unit school zone in terms of the number of children traffic accidents reduced. Furthermore, despite the continuing improvement project, the number of children traffic accidents in the school zones nationwide for the past three years has increased from 427 cases to 541 cases. Faced with this situation, it seems that there is a need to review and re-evaluate the school zone improvement projects that have been carried out up until now.
Accordingly, in this research, an attempt was made to analyze the impact relations among traffic safety features that are newly installed or improved when a school zone improvement project is implemented, school zone traffic environment of roads involved, and children accidents. Target for the analysis was children accident black spots within the school zones that were selected by KoRoad TAAS (Traffic Accident Analysis System of KoRoad) for the past 5 years. The range of accident data was limited to the past 6 years. As for target unit of analysis, each school zone was not selected as a target unit. Instead, each school zone was divided in terms of characteristics of roads and the resulting units were selected as target of analysis.
To analyze impact relations among children accidents, school zone traffic environment of roads involved, and traffic safety features, an occurrence probability model of children accidents was constructed using a binary logistic regression model. Instead of taking entire roads of a school zone divided as target, two separate models were constructed for block inside and arterial road group.
As a result of model construction, in the case of block inside, minimum sidewalk width, speed bump, and elevated crosswalk turned out to be impact factors in the occurrence of children accidents. But in the case of arterial roads, speed limit, roadside barriers, and red pavement of road surfaces turned out to be impact factors. In addition, regarding impact factors derived by group, priority order was graded for factors that should be taken into consideration when carrying out school zone improvement projects and school zone repair projects based on Wald statistics and odds ratio value.
This research has significance in that, whereas existing studies placed an emphasis on school zone traffic environment of roads, road traffic safety features, and speed reduction effect in the main, it examined their impact relations with children accidents. It is hoped that the outcome of this research can be of some help to school zone improvement projects and school zone repair projects in the future as basic research data.