Addressing the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem in Traffic Safety: Definition, Potential Solutions and Future Research

This study fully addressed the modifiable areal unit problem (i.e. MAUP) that was well-known in geography but generally ignored by safety analysts. The basic issue of MAUP was introduced firstly, and then four potential strategies, i.e. using disaggregate data as possible, capturing spatial non-stationarity, designing optimal zoning systems, conducting sensitivity analysis to report the scope and magnitude of MAUP, were proposed and illustrated to deal with the problem in an integrated way, followed by the future research directions suggested in the end. As model building and calibration activities are not independent of zone design, the MAUP should not only be addressed from the perspective of statistical analysis, but also need a geographical solution. Specifically, in traffic safety, more efforts are desired to calibrate the state-of-art modeling technique at various levels of data aggregation based on spatial homogeneity in traffic safety, transport characteristics, and