Kevin Lee’s research while affiliated with Western Michigan University and other places

Cycling is an eco-friendly and sustainable mode of transportation. Despite its benefits, the cyclists’ risk of collision is still high when interacting with other road users. This study analyzed self-reported near-miss and collision event descriptions for the United States provided by the crowdsourcing platform, BikeMaps.org. Innovative and efficient analytic methods are needed to generate useful information from unstructured textual data sources in the transportation domain. In this study, explorative text mining, topic modeling, and machine learning are utilized to gain insights from the unstructured textual descriptions of crowdsourced near-miss and collision events. The approaches are used to unveil prevalent words and word associations for near-miss and collision events. Structural Topic Modeling (STM) is deployed to autogenerate latent themes or topics from the event descriptions. The generated topic proportions are used as input in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to estimate the cyclist’s propensity to a collision. It was found that cyclists had a higher propensity to a collision in topics that articulated vehicle encroachment to the bike lane, on-street parking close or into the bike lane resulting in dooring, and drivers’ violations at the crosswalk. The results and methodology used in this study can assist engineers, policymakers, and law enforcement officers to proactively reduce potential cyclist collisions, prioritizing areas where cyclist safety improvements are needed, and ultimately promoting bicycle ridership in our communities.

The proliferation of digital textual archives in the transportation safety domain makes it imperative for the inventions of efficient ways of extracting information from the textual data sources. The present study aims at utilizing crash narratives complemented by crash metadata to discern the prevalence and co-occurrence of themes that contribute to crash incidents. Ten years (2009–2018) of Michigan traffic fatal crash narratives were used as a case study. The structural topic modeling (STM) and network topology analysis were used to generate and examine the prevalence and interaction of themes from the crash narratives that were mainly categorized into pre-crash events, crash locations and involved parties in the traffic crashes. The main advantage of the STM over the other topic modeling approaches is that it allows the researchers to discover themes from documents and estimate how the topic relates to the document metadata. Topics with the highest prevalence for the angle, head-on, rear-end, sideswipe and single motor vehicle crashes were crash at stop-sign, crossing the centerline, unable to stop, lane change maneuver and run-off-road crash, respectively. Eigenvector centrality measure in network topology showed that event-related topics were consistently central in articulating the crash occurrence. The centrality and association between topics varied across crash types. The efficacy of generated topics in classifying crashes by type was tested using a machine learning algorithm, Random Forest. The classification accuracy in the held-out sample ranged between 89.3 % for sideswipe crashes to 99.2 % for single motor vehicle crashes. High classification accuracy suggests that automation of crash typing and consistency checks can be accomplished effectively by using extracted latent themes from the crash narratives. Free download link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1cB8C_27lVu7d