Safer Traffic Recovery from the Pandemic in London -- Spatiotemporal Data Mining of Car Crashes

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spatiotemporal patterns of car crashes in London before and during the pandemic, identifying hot spots, influential factors, and age-specific casualty patterns to inform safer recovery policies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis combining spatial analysis, factor analysis, and data mining to understand crash patterns and influencing factors in London during the pandemic.

Findings

Crashes mainly clustered in central London around POIs.

POIs reflect citizens' activities and influence crash patterns.

Casualty patterns vary significantly by age group.

Abstract

In the aim to support London's safer recovery from the pandemic by improving road safety intelligently, this study investigated the spatiotemporal patterns of age-involved car crashes and affecting factors, upon answering two main research questions: (1)"What are the spatial and temporal patterns of car crashes as well as their changes in two typical years, 2019 and 2020, in London, and how the influential factors work?"; (2)"What are the spatiotemporal patterns of casualty by age groups, and how people's daily activities affect the patterns pre- and para- the pandemic"? Three approaches, i.e., spatial analysis (network Kernel Density Estimation, NetKDE), factor analysis, and spatiotemporal data mining (tensor decomposition), had been implemented to identify the temporal patterns of car crashes on weekly and daily basis respectively, detect the crashes' hot spots, and to gain better understanding the effect from citizens' daily activity on crashes' patterns pre- and para- the pandemic. It had been found from the study that car crashes mainly clustered in the central part of London, especially busier areas around denser hubs of point-of-interest (POIs); the POIs, as a reflector for citizens' daily activities and travel behaviours, can be of help to gain a better understanding of the crashes' patterns, upon further assessment on interactions through the geographical detector; the crashes' casualty patterns varied by age group, with distinctive relationships between POIs and crashes' pattern for corresponding age group categorised. In all, the paper provided an in-depth exploratory analysis of car crashes and their casualty patterns in London to facilitate deployment policies towards post-pandemic safer recovery upon COVID-19.