Lacking protection compared to drivers of other vehicles, motorcyclists accounted for most casualties and fatalities. This study explores how non-motorcycle drivers affect motorcyclists’ injury outcomes in motorcycle-vehicle collisions. The motorcycle-vehicle crashes from the United Kingdom for 2016–2020 are used to estimate two alternative logit models to account for possible unobserved heterogeneities. The models are a latent class multinomial logit with class probability functions and a random threshold-parameter generalized ordered logit. With three possible injury severity levels (fatal injury, severe injury, and minor injury), the characteristics of motorcyclist, driver, roadway, environment, vehicle, and collision are considered potential determinants. Then, the temporal instability issues are revealed through the likelihood ratio tests and out-of-sample predictions based on the two models. Showing good (Formula presented.) values of over 0.370, the latent class model’s estimation results are leveraged to quantify the effects of the contributing factors. Moreover, the marginal effects are also calculated to reveal the existing temporal instability, while some variables reflect the temporal instability in the influence trend and degree. The critical factors increasing the risk levels are male motorcyclists, higher speed limit, older ages of motorcyclists and vehicles, fine weather, single carriageway, and head-on collision type. Overall, subtle variations in the injury severity predictions exist in alternative heterogeneity modeling approaches, suffering from the modeling mechanism of different structural frameworks in capturing the unobserved heterogeneities.

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This study proposes random-parameters multinomial logit models, with heterogeneity in means and variances, to explore the differences in the factors influencing injury severities of drivers involved in different types of two-vehicle crashes. The models are verified using crash data from the United Kingdom (UK) over three years (2016–2018). Three types of crashes are separately identified (car-car, car-truck, and truck-truck crashes). In this study, a wide variety of potential variables, including the driver, vehicle, road, and environmental characteristics, are considered, with two possible injury-severity outcomes: severe and slight injury. The results show that unobserved heterogeneity existed for young drivers in both car-car and truck-truck crash models and the 30 mph speed limit in the three separate models. Remarkably variations are observed in crashes involving different types of vehicles. The driver’s age and gender, speeding, sideswipes, presence of junctions, weekdays, unlit, and weather conditions significantly impact driver-injury severities in various types of vehicle crashes. These findings are expected to help policymakers seek to improve highway safety and implement proper safety countermeasures.@en