Alternative outcome frameworks to model injury severity outcomes of motorcyclists colliding with other vehicles

Abstract

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.