Geographical Patterns in Road Safety: Literature Review and a Case Study from Germany

Abstract

This paper aims to geographically differentiate the road accident costs associated with living at a certain place of residence. Official accident data in Germany record the place the accident occurred, but not the casualties' places of residence. Among those involved in an accident at a certain place there may obviously be some non-residents. Hence spatial analysis based on place of accident may not be suitable for drawing conclusions about specific cost (or risk) figures for people living in certain places. People’s risk of encountering an accident in areas other than that where they live may vary with their mobility. We provide an extensive literature review of geographical accident analysis both for place of accident-based and place of residence-based approaches, including the question to what extent accident related analyses can be used to estimate residential related risks. Subsequently we report on a residence-based case study for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia where we study per capita accident cost figures on the district level. We also examine impact factors of accident cost levels using structural equation modelling. The results show that the cost figures are considerably lower for urban residents than for suburban and rural dwellers. For children the picture is more mixed.