High and Low Deer-Vehicle Collision Roadway Sections - What Makes Them Different?

This paper studies deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) by examining roadway geometric and roadside characteristics in northeast Ohio. A total of 1,208 non-intersection crashes in rural highways have been investigated for three years (2001-2003), covering 173.5 miles of two-lane highways on which 46% of the crashes are DVCs. In order to find the main differences between the sections that showed high DVC rate and those with low or no crashes in the same highway, field surveys have been performed to collect necessary geometric and roadside information in support of the study. Data analysis has been performed to identify feature variables that are statistically significant in the high DVC sections.

The results of the analysis suggest that the distance between the wooded areas to the roadway, the percentage of the ditches, and the number of vertical curves are the most important factors that distinguish the high and low DVC sections. The probability of hitting a deer is three times as large if a farm is nearby. The result also shows that there is no association between high DVC and high run-off-road (ROR) crashes in the study area.