Using data mining techniques to road safety improvement in Spanish roads.

Crashes are events that involve the interaction of different components: road, driver, vehicle and environment. Nevertheless, road is an essential component and improvements on road conditions are directly related to increased traffic safety. From 2008 to 2010 a road safety inspection project was developed, whose aim was to identify and collect information about hazardous points on the Complementary Road Network of Andalusia, Spain, and build a database with this information. These elements were technically called Susceptible Elements of Improvement (ESM), which are defined as elements on the road that show worse road conditions than the ideal road safety standards. The main objective of this paper is to study the relationship between ESMs, number of crashes and hazardous sections, by analysing the information gathered in this database with advanced data mining techniques. Economically, this project is rather beneficial, since the resources of governments are limited, and therefore, it is necessary to intervene in those sections that have a higher cost-effectiveness ratio. Therefore, these relationships between roads conditions and crashes will be identified by analysing the information available in this data set of the Government of Andalusia, which has not been previously used. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.