Analysis of Heterogenous Motorcycle Risk Perception and Crash Exposure in Developing Country’s Urban Driving Environment: Precursors and Policy Implications Using Structural Equation Modeling

Bangladesh has the world's greatest death rate from motorcycle accidents, which account for the vast majority of all traffic crashes in Bangladesh. The rate has also been increasing over the past few years. Despite the increase in accidents, there is also a rising trend in the use of motorcycles because of demand, accessibility, affordability, ridesharing, and several other factors. Therefore, motorcycle crash risk factors, risk assessment, and policy implications must be studied. Data on perceived risk was collected from 1,559 participants via offline and online questionnaires for this investigation. Age, gender, occupation, residence division, usage classifications, ridesharing app usage frequency, and ratings of the perceived risk of 38 precursors to motorcycling crashes in Dhaka's urban environment were collected. Structural Equation modeling (SEM) was used to develop six empirical models from six different domains of dataset to detect ranking and contributions of different precursors on safety status and crash exposure after calibrating with collected data. ‘OnstreetParking’, ‘SideRoadEntry’, and ‘CutinMovement’ ranked in the top three with perceived risk coefficients of 0.633, 0.623, and 0.620, respectively, in the SEM model with overall dataset. Policy implications considering Safe System Approach have been analyzed from significance and ranking of precursors. As road safety is a shared responsibility for all road users, any developing country's urban context will benefit tremendously to enhance safety from the provided SEM analysis for crash analysis and prevention after implementing data from road users.