The Impact of Built Environment on Speeding Behavior: An Analysis in Curitiba - Brazil

Abstract

The speeding behavior of vehicle drivers is one of the main risk factors for traffic crashes, influencing the severity and the risk of occurrence of these crashes. City development characteristics, including the built environment, can influence the road safety performance in urban environments. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of the built environment on speeding behavior, using the city of Curitiba, Brazil, as the study setting. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) models were applied to analyze the effects of six dimensions of the built environment on speeding rate, using traffic analysis zones as the zonal level. The speeding data was extracted from a naturalistic driving study, which included 16 participating drivers. It was observed that the density of speed cameras was significantly associated with lower speeding rates. The current sample of performed trips was not enough to cover all traffic analysis zones and the GWR models did not achieve the expected performance. Therefore, future work should include the development of new models with larger samples to reach more conclusions.

Keywords: built environment, road safety, speeding behavior, naturalistic driving study