Road Accident Models for Large Metropolitan Cities of India

In most of the metropolitan cities in India, the road use patterns are very different from those of developed countries. In Indian cities, roads are shared by nonmotorized vehicles in large numbers. The rapid urbanization in India after independence has resulted in the faster development of 23 metropolitan cities as per the 2001 census. While the alarming increase in road accidents has become a major concern in the country, which takes away more than 90,000 lives every year, a significant share of it is from the major cities. The aim of the present paper is to develop models by analyzing the road accident data at an all India level as well as for major metropolitan cities. The data for the 25 year period from 1977 to 2001 were analyzed to build models to understand the nature and extent of the causes of accidents using the concept of Smeed’s formula and Andressen’s equations. On the basis of population and motor vehicle growth rates, which were derived from the empirical formulae, the above models were used for estimating road accidents in seven metropolitan cities for the years 2007 and 2010. As the variation between model and observed values is negligible, models seem to perform well for both equations.