Where and when pedestrians get hit on Metro Manila's national roads

Pedestrians are the road users most exposed to harm. About 23 percent of road fatalities worldwide are pedestrians, more than 1.3 million deaths a year, and developing countries carry most of that burden. Few studies characterize pedestrian crashes by road type in those countries. Domer Dacles Obinguar and Miho Iryo-Asano set out to identify what leads to pedestrian crashes on national roads in Metro Manila, so road authorities have something concrete to act on.

Approach

The study used pedestrian crash records for Metro Manila from 2016 to 2018, taken from the Metro Manila Accident Reporting and Analysis System (MMRAS) database. Road network data and road features came from DPWH, MMDA, PSA, and Google Maps. Twenty parameters were grouped into six categories: pedestrian characteristics, basic crash information, traffic volume, road characteristics, land-use type, and population.

Frequency and severity were modeled separately. Crash frequency per road section was modeled with a negative binomial (Poisson family) regression across 202 road sections. Crash severity, whether a crash was fatal, was modeled with binomial logistic regression across 6,260 crashes.

Findings

Pedestrian crashes are more frequent on road sections with bad surface conditions, with larger shares of residential, commercial, and industrial land use, and with more footbridges. Secondary and tertiary roads have a lower likelihood of pedestrian crashes than primary roads.

For severity, elderly pedestrians, heavy vehicles, and late-night hours (midnight to 5 a.m.) all raise the likelihood that a crash is fatal. Compared with a motorcycle, a heavy vehicle has the largest coefficient of any vehicle type. The overall severity rate was lower than the authors expected, which they attribute mainly to Manila’s frequent congestion keeping vehicle speeds down. Fatalities are also more common in densely populated areas and on sections with more open-space land use.

What they recommend

The results point to four things for transport planners: account for land use when thinking about pedestrian safety, restrict pedestrian access to roads with high traffic volume, provide proper segregation between road users, and put safety measures in place where the risk is highest. The authors also push for a standardized way of collecting crash data, such as the World Bank’s Data for Road Incident Visualization Evaluation and Reporting (DRIVER) system, so future analyses have better input.

Source: Obinguar, D. D., and Iryo-Asano, M. (2021). Macroscopic analysis on the frequency and severity of pedestrian crashes on National Roads in Metro Manila, Philippines. IATSS Research, 45(4), 521 to 529. doi:10.1016/j.iatssr.2021.06.003

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