Traffic Crash Profiles
Last modified Tuesday, October 24, 2006 15:51
A traffic accident takes place every 2.8 minutes across the 18-county metro Atlanta area, costing the region $4.7 billion a year and contributing to more than half of its traffic congestion.
A new report from the Atlanta Regional Commission – “Traffic Crash Profiles for the Atlanta Region” – details the number and rates of crashes, injuries, deaths and comparative rankings among the 18-county region in an effort to highlight collision hot spots, high-crash intersections and to better understand the relationship between crashes and congested roadways.
The report answers the questions of how many, how severe, what kind and where motor vehicle crashes happen on the region’s roadways, information that can be used to help local, state and federal agencies pinpoint high-risk locations, identify contributing factors and determine roadway safety needs. Crashes involving pedestrians, bicyclists and commercial vehicles are also examined.
About 45 percent of the 189,422 crashes each year in the 18-county region take place at intersections. The ARC report highlights the 10 most crash-prone intersections in the region, half of which are located in Cobb County. Three others are in Fulton County with one each in Clayton and Rockdale counties. The rankings are based on the three-year crash totals from 2002 to 2004. Several of the intersections were improved after the three-year data period or are scheduled for safety improvements in the near future. As additional crash data becomes available in future years, it will be possible to examine the safety impacts of those improvements.
The intersections are Austell Road at East-West Connector (Cobb, 477 crashes), Barrett Parkway at Cobb Place Boulevard (Cobb, 377), Cobb Parkway at Barrett Parkway (Cobb, 376), Tara Boulevard at North Avenue (Clayton, 368), Sigman Road at Walnut Grove Road (Rockdale, 324), Buford Highway at Lenox Road (Fulton, 316), Chastain Road at Busbee Parkway (Cobb, 296), Alpharetta Highway at Houze Way (Fulton, 291), Austell Road at South Cobb Drive (Cobb, 263) and Roswell Road at Abernathy Road (Fulton, 231).
ARC’s “Traffic Crash Profiles for the Atlanta Region” includes 18 counties – Barrow, Bartow, Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, Coweta, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, Newton, Paulding, Rockdale, Spalding and Walton – and is culled from a motor vehicle crash database maintained by the Georgia Department of Transportation. The crash data analysis was conducted using Critical Analysis Reporting Environment software developed by the University of Alabama.
Although crash statistics in the report include the freeway network, maps and the lists of the most crash-prone intersections do not include those facilities due to limitations on the data. Since crash occurrences fluctuate from year to year, a most recent three-year average of crash data from 2002 to 2004 was used in compiling the report.
View your county's profile by selecting a link below:
(All files are in PDF format.)
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