Frequency and Severity of Belgian Road Traffic Accidents Studied by State-Space Methods

In this paper the authors investigate the monthly frequency and severity of road traffic accidents in Belgium from 1974 to 1999. They describe the trend in the time series, quantify the impact of explanatory variables, and make predictions. They found that laws concerning seat belts, speed, and alcohol have proven successful. Furthermore, road safety increases with freezing temperatures while sun has the opposite effect, and precipitation and thunderstorms particularly influence accidents with light injuries. Economic conditions have a limited impact. State-space methodology is used throughout the analysis. The authors compared the results of this study with those of earlier research that applied a regression model with autoregressive moving average errors on the same data. Many similarities were found between these two approaches.

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