Comparison analysis between real accident locations and simulated risk areas in an urban road network

Recently, many researchers have employed a microsimulation technique to study the chain of interactions among vehicles, which generates an accident occurrence in some circumstances. This new approach to studying road safety is named traffic conflict technique. The aim of this paper is to assess how the microscopic simulation is a useful tool to identify potentially unsafe vehicle interactions and how high-risk locations identified by a microsimulation technique are similar to the ones identified by using historical accident data. Results show that high-risk locations identified by the simulation framework are superimposable to those identified by using the historical accident database. In particular, the statistical analysis employed based on Pearson’s correlation demonstrates a significative correspondence between a risk rate defined with simulation and an accident rate determined by the observed accidents dataset.