IDENTIFICATION OF DOMINANT FACTORS CAUSING TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS ON NATIONAL ROADS: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE STUDY

Abstract

Traffic accidents in national roads have always been a major issue since national roads accommodate intercity movement with high-speed movements and mixed vehicle types. The purpose of this research is to find out the key factors leading to traffic accidents in the case of national roads by using the literature review method. The data for this research was collected from 24 scientific articles written in the past ten years, and all articles are open-access where one can download them whenever they want. The factors identified were recorded in an Excel table and categorized into six groups, including human/driver factors, vehicle factors, road factors, road furniture/safety factors, environment/weather factors, and traffic factors plus accident-prone locations. The analysis was done based on the frequency of appearance of each factor among all the articles. From the analysis of data obtained from the study, it is evident that the first factor with a frequency of occurrence of 18 or 31.6 percent is that of human and driver behavior, followed by that of road condition and geometry having a frequency of occurrence of 13 or 22.8 percent, traffic characteristics and accident-prone locations occurring 12 times or 21.1 percent and environment and weather occurring 6 times or 10.5 percent. Conditions and features of vehicles occur four times as do those of road furniture which have a frequency of occurrence of 7.0 percent. These results prove that accidents along national highways are created by the interaction of driver mistakes with conditions in the roadsides which cannot tolerate such mistakes, and therefore, the way out lies in combining law enforcement with the improvement of accident-prone sites and construction of safety facilities.