2024 Volume 80 Issue 20 Article ID: 24-20103
In recent years, traffic accidents have occurred on school routes one after another, and a joint inspection of school routes was conducted in response to a traffic accident that occurred in Yachimata City, Chiba Prefecture, in June 2021. While there is a need to improve traffic safety on school routes, many local governments and elementary schools have not established quantitative standards or indicators for setting school routes, which may prevent them from selecting appropriate routes and implementing traffic safety measures. In this study, we clarified the relationship between road characteristics and traffic accident risk using the network kernel density estimation method, and examined whether appropriate routes to school are set up in an area within a 500-m radius of an elementary school. As a result, it was shown that there were elementary schools where safe roads were not selected as school routes and the risk of traffic accidents was higher on school routes than on non-school routes.
