ALBERT

Description: Understanding the risk factors of e-bike collisions can improve e-bike riders’ safety awareness and help traffic professionals to develop effective countermeasures. This study investigates risk factors that significantly contribute to the severity of e-bike collisions. Two months of e-bike collision data were collected in the city of Ningbo, China. A random parameters multinomial logit regression (RP-MNL) is proposed to account for the unobserved heterogeneity across observations. A fixed parameters multinomial logit regression (FP-MNL) is estimated and compared with the RP-MNL under the Bayesian framework. The full Bayesian approach based on Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation is employed to estimate the model parameters. Both parameter estimates and odds ratio (OR) are used to interpret the impact of risk factors on the severity of e-bike collisions. The model comparison results show that RP-MNL outperforms FP-MNL, indicating that accommodating the unobserved heterogeneity across observations could improve the model fit. The model estimation results show that age, gender, e-bike behavior, license plate, bicycle type, location, and speed limit are statistically significant and associated with the severity of e-bike collisions. Furthermore, four risk factors, i.e., gender, e-bike behavior, bicycle type, and speed limit, are found to have heterogeneous effects on severity of e-bike collisions, appearing in the form of random parameters in the statistical model.