Evaluating the effectiveness of law enforcement in reducing truck crashes for a rural mountainous freeway in Wyoming

ABSTRACT

Interstate 80 (I-80) in Wyoming has one of the highest truck traffic in the United States. Truck-related crashes are more likely to occur on this highway. The Wyoming Highway Patrol (WHP) administers traffic citations to deter traffic violations across roadways and enhance traffic safety. This paper investigates police citations’ influence on truck-related crashes and identifies the high-risk locations and times for crash hotspots. It offers useful insights on how citations could prevent crashes. To achieve this, spatial and temporal techniques were applied to examine law enforcement’s impact on I-80. Different datasets were compiled including crash, citation, traffic, geometry and weather data. A noticeable difference was reported between the locations of crashes and citations.  Negative Binomial (NB) and Zero Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) models were developed to analyze the dataset. The results showed how effectively citations could improve traffic safety on a year-quarter scale by providing updated crash and enforcement data.

KEYWORDS:

• Traffic citations
• spatial and temporal techniques
• crash hotspots
• Negative Binomial (NB)
• truck crashes
• rural mountainous interstates

Notes on contributors

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: field experiment and data preparation: Anas Alrejjal; analysis, and interpretation of results: Anas Alrejjal, and Khaled Ksaibati; modeling: Anas Alrejjal and Khaled Ksaibati; study conception: Anas Alrejjal and Khaled Ksaibati. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Highlights

• Investigating the hotspot location of crashes more accurately is vital for traffic enforcement agencies

• There is a negative correlation between the prior quarter of the citations and the after crash quarters for three years

• Crash and enforcement data should be updated on a short-time scale

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from the Mountain–Plains Consortium (MPC) for this study. All opinions, finding and results are solely those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

The authors do not have any conflict of interest with other entities or researchers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Mountain Plains Consortium [69A3551747108 (FAST Act)].