The impact of roadway conditions towards accident severity on federal roads in Malaysia

Mohad Fedder Musa; Sitti Asmah Hassan; Nordiana Mashros

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0235564

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 12, 2020
7 Apr 2020 Decision Letter - Feng Chen, Editor PONE-D-20-07171 The impact of roadway conditions on accident severity on Federal Roads in Malaysia PLOS ONE Dear Dr Hassan, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by May 22 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. 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Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: No ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? 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Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This paper investigates the effects of roadway conditions on traffic crash severity on Federal roads in Malaysia. Although the authors have found something, the contributions of the findings are very limited. There are several reasons for the limitations of this research: 1. Only the fatal crash data are used in the analysis which cannot provide a comprehensive understanding of crash severity (usually including other severity levels such as no injury, minor injury, and severe injury). Focusing on fatal crashes also significantly reduces the size of crash dataset, which may result in small size problem on model parameter estimation. 2. The binary Logistic regression is too simple, which cannot guarantee the precise of the estimation results. Please refer to the Mannering and Bhat (2014) and Savolainen et al. (2011) for the introduction of more advanced methods. 3. The factors related to drivers, vehicles, and weather conditions which have been found to significantly impact crash severity, are not controlled in the analysis, which may also lead to biased inference. At least, major revisions are required; otherwise, I do not recommend its publication. Some other comments are as follows: As the current research focuses on analyzing crash severity, the review part of methods for crash frequency should be removed from the Introduction section. Instead, more introduction on the crash severity models should be added. According to information in the data collection section, there are about 900 serious or minor injury crashes collected. Why are not they used in the analysis of crash severity? In Table 1, the definitions of good and bad conditions of each variable should be described. They are very vague to readers. In Table 3, the authors seems to copy the results from the SPSS immediately. The terms, such as “B” and “S.E.”, are not formal. Mannering, F. L., Bhat C. R., 2014. Analytic methods in accident research: Methodological frontier and future directions. Analytic Methods in Accident Research 1: 1-22. Savolainen, P. T., Mannering, F. L., Lord, D., Quddus, M. A., 2011. The statistical analysis of highway crash-injury severities: A review and assessment of methodological alternatives. Accident Analysis and Prevention 43 (5), 1666-1676. Reviewer #2: This paper claims to investigate the impact of roadway conditions on traffic accident severity of federal road in Malaysia. There are some serious flaws with the manuscript as listed below: 1. The data adopted in this paper only included 166 accidents with 1067 cases. This raises several concerns about the validity of the paper. First of all, an investigation towards injury severity using only 166 accidents suffers greatly from the small sample size issues. By processing 166 accidents into 1067 cases makes it even worse. Since it means one accident is split into multiple cases where the severity outcomes will be different but the nine explanatory variables remains the same. 2. The simple logistic regression is not appropriate for analyzing injury severity because it doesn't not account for unobserved heterogeneity issues often present in crash data. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. 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Revision 1
22 May 2020 Author Response 1. Figure 1 was drawn by authors based on data reported by the refer Malaysian Automotive Association. Malaysia Automotive Info “Summary of Sales & Production Data.” Malaysia; 2017 (reference no. 10). Citation was added to the caption of the figure. 2. I believe the comment was made for Figure 2. Figure 2 contains map image. The figure was removed from the manuscript. Caption of Figure 2 is as below: Fig 2. Federal roads involve in this particular study was indicated in red line (Source: Public Work Department) Response to Reviewer 1: 1. Thanks for your kind observation, critics and comments in the overall improvement of the manuscript. Road accident fatalities have become top priorities and concerns for Malaysia policymakers, hence, understanding the principal factors that explain accident fatality is considered to be the first step towards the adequate design of an accident prevention strategy related to road condition. This was the original motivation in the previous analysis. Based on the comments received, the new data analysis was performed by including all accident severity (no injury, slight injury, serious injury and fatal injury). We admit the small sample size issues. However, the raw data obtained was from Royal Malaysia Police and Public Work Department database (from 2008 to 2015). 2. The initial motivation of the study was to adopt the logistic regression approach based on the availability & suitability of data source/type (Reference: Al-Ghamdi AS. Using logistic regression to estimate the influence of accident factors on accident severity. Accident Analysis and Prevention. 2002;34(6):729–741.). Based on your suggestion, we re-evaluate the propose model in the revised manuscript by utilizing Ordered Logit Model (OLM)- Mannering and Bhat (2014) and Savolainen et al. (2011). Additional related references were also included. 3. We admit that the accident may due to several factors. The data collection was obtained from a traditional data source in which it is limited in many ways. The Royal Malaysia Police and Public Work Department (PWD) database revealed the accident severity and variables associated to it mostly on road conditions. For instance, the roadway design and maintenance is under the job scope of traffic engineer. Therefore, explanatory variables related to roadway conditions is worth to be explored in Malaysia condition for safety mitigation strategies at practitioners’ levels. 4. Other Comments: • Methods for crash frequency models have been removed from the manuscript. • Alternatively, crash severity models have been included in the revised manuscript. • Understanding the fatal contributing factors was the initial motivation of the study. However, based on your recommendation, the revised version was made to include all accident severity. • This statement was made before the appearance of Table 1: “The good and poor characteristics of these variables were classified when they conformed to the PWD specification and not in conformity, respectively.” Reference related to the PWD specification was also added at the end of the statement in the revised manuscript. • “B” and “SE” were omitted from the manuscript. Response to Reviewer 2: 1. Thanks for your kind observation, critics and comments. We have provided the answer of the same issue mentioned by reviewer #1. Road accident fatalities have become top priorities and concerns for Malaysia policymakers, hence, understanding the principal factors that explain accident fatality is considered to be the first step towards the adequate design of an accident prevention strategy related to road condition. This was the original motivation in the previous analysis. We admit the small sample size issues, but this was the original data obtained from Royal Police Malaysia and Public Work Department database. Given the limitation in data, accident severity model in this study can be used at practitioners’ level in which all the explanatory variables are within their authority. Due to small data size, we are unable to consider unobserved heterogeneity factors. According to Mannering et al., 2016, random parameters, latent class, and other unobserved heterogeneity approaches will mitigate the adverse impacts of omitting significant explanatory variables, the resulting model estimates will not be able to track the unobserved heterogeneity as well as when having the significant omitted variables included in the specification. Thus leaving out important explanatory variables still remains a problem even with advanced approaches to account for unobserved heterogeneity. However, statistical approaches that address unobserved heterogeneity tend to be more complex from a model estimation perspective (Reference: Mannering, F. L., Shankar, V., & Bhat, C. R. (2016). Unobserved heterogeneity and the statistical analysis of highway accident data. Analytic Methods in Accident Research, 11, 1–16) 2. Based on your input, the initial binary logistic regression model is now replaced by ordered logistic regression model. All accident severities were evaluated in the new analysis (no injury, slight injury, serious injury, and fatal). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235564.r002
1 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Feng Chen, Editor PONE-D-20-07171R1 The impact of roadway conditions towards accident severity on Federal Roads in Malaysia PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Hassan, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 16 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Feng Chen Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The authors should be thanked for their great efforts on improving the manuscript. Most of my comments have been addressed properly. A minor suggestion is that more works on generalized ordered logit models should be acknowledged in the Introduction Section, including: Investigating the impacts of real-time weather conditions on freeway crash severity: A Bayesian spatial analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020, 17(8), 2768. Analyzing freeway crash severity using a Bayesian spatial generalized ordered logit model with conditional autoregressive priors. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 2019, 127, 87-95. Reviewer #2: The paper has addressed most of the concerns about the paper, however, the following relevant papers should be discussed in the literature review and included in the reference: [1] Feng Chen, Mingtao Song and Xiaoxiang Ma, Investigation on the Injury Severity of Drivers in Rear-End Collisions Between Cars Using a Random Parameters Bivariate Ordered Probit Model, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019, 16(14) , 2632. [2] Chen, Feng; Chen, Suren; Ma, Xiaoxiang. Analysis of hourly crash likelihood using unbalanced panel data mixed logit model and real-time driving environmental big data. 2018, JOURNAL OF SAFETY RESEARCH. 65: 153-159. [3] Bowen Dong, Xiaoxiang Ma, Feng Chen and Suren Chen. “Investigating the Differences of Single- and Multi-vehicle Accident Probability Using Mixed Logit Model", Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2018, UNSP 2702360. [4] Ma, X., Chen, F., Chen, S., 2015. Empirical analysis of crash injury severity on mountainous and non-mountainous interstate highways. Traffic Inj. Prev. 16 7 , 715–723. doi:10.1080/15389588.2015.1010721 ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235564.r003
Revision 2
2 Jun 2020 Author Response Response to Reviewer #1: Thanks for your suggestions. The additional works on the GLOM have been added in the Introduction section. Response to Reviewer #2: Thanks for your suggestions. The additional references have been added in the manuscript. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235564.r004
18 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Feng Chen, Editor The impact of roadway conditions towards accident severity on Federal Roads in Malaysia PONE-D-20-07171R2 Dear Dr. Hassan, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Feng Chen Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235564.r005
Formally Accepted
23 Jun 2020 Acceptance Letter - Feng Chen, Editor PONE-D-20-07171R2 The impact of roadway conditions towards accident severity on Federal Roads in Malaysia Dear Dr. Hassan: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Feng Chen Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235564.r006

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