| Summary: | Traffic incident, which usually decreases the traffic capacity, is one of the important reasons that causes traffic delay and the exhaust emission, and is also the crucial factor to influence the traffic safety. In order to reduce or eliminate the influence of the negative factor caused by incidents as much as possible, it is necessary to detect the incident as quickly and accurately as possible.
Data was obtained from the LTA’s Integrated Transport Systems Centre for the whole month of July 2008. The data collected was used to analyse the profile of Singapore’s expressways. Statistical analyses such as mean, standard deviation and coefficient of variation were used to analyse the data given. In addition, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to compare the coefficient between various factors affecting traffic incidents and their significance.
It was observed that there is an increasing trend of incidents happening on Singapore expressways. Though an incident is considered as a non-recurring event affecting traffic flow, various factors affect the number of incidents. The factors include day pattern (weekday versus weekend, daytime versus nighttime, peak versus non-peak hour), type of vehicles and state of road during an accident.
There are various causes for non-accident incidents. There are vehicle-related causes such as mechanical breakdown, punctured tyre; owner-related causes such as no petrol, unattended vehicle and other causes which may be caused by pedestrians, animals, trees or falling object from vehicles.
There are various kind of accidents, such as self skidded, self skidded with injury, accident involving two or more vehicles, accident involving two or more vehicles with injury and fatal accident. The data collected shows a very positive result as the number of fatal accidents is very low, showing that Singapore expressways are generally safe.
From the analysis, it is found that the number of non-accident incidents could be reduced as most of them are due to poor vehicle maintenance and driver’s irresponsibility. Penalties could be imposed on them to better improve the traffic situation.
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