Brianna Hutchinson

This paper will look to identify how the built environment can affect collisions at intersections. The Regional Municipality of York was used as the study area. York Region has areas of high-density traffic as well as rural regional road. Due to York Region’s proximity to Toronto there is also commuting traffic during rush hours. A literature review looked into different studies of traffic collisions. A focus of many was human factors, such as impaired driving, distracted driving and inexperience to name a few. For this paper, the focus is on the built features and how different design components of on intersection can affect the number of collisions. Using information from the literature review data was gathered for different built environment features, i.e. intersection type, bus stops and red-light cameras. Data was also gathered for collisions that occurred in York Region, this included the location, time of day, day of the week, and initial impact type. To evaluate how these features effected the number of collisions at an intersection, descriptive statistics, linear regression and qualitative analysis was used. The descriptive statistic shows an overview and percentage of accidents that occurred in separate groups. These groups include property damage, injury, and fatal accidents, traffic control types, and intersection types. Linear regression was used to determine which factors were increasing the number of accidents and which were helping to decrease accidents. Finally, qualitative analysis was used to study the intersections that had the top ten number of accidents that were fatal or injury. After completing the analysis, a case study was conducted on three intersections, one that has seen an increase in accidents one that has seen a decrease in accidents and finally one that has consistently had a high accident count. From all the information and analysis conclusions and recommendations were put forward to help improve road safety in York Region.