Modeling the Impact of Driving Styles on Crash Severity Level Using SHRP 2 Naturalistic Driving Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is interesting and well-written. The reviewer has a few concerns as follows:

1. In abstract, the objective of the study is to investigate the relationship between driving styles and crash severity. However, the results only show the influences of driving styles and driver characteristics on either crash frequency or the number of non-crash safety critical events.

2. According to the goal of this study, a review regarding the studies on the effect of driving style on crash severity is advised to be added.

3. why the review focuses on the multivariate count models literature? It is not the main contribution of this study, so it should be concise.

4. Based on the naturalistic driving data, it may be interesting to explore the effect of driving styles on near-miss events such traffic conflicts. While it is not the goal of this study, the reviewer suggests the authors to mention this topic as one of future directions. Some useful papers are presented as follows:

A systematic mapping review of surrogate safety assessment using traffic conflict techniques

A multivariate method for evaluating safety from conflict extremes in real time

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between driving styles and crash severity levels based on naturalistic data from the SHRP2 program. The purpose is well-defined and the expression is fluent and easy to understand. The table design is presented in a clear and concise manner. The article uses more objective data than usual to explore the impact of driving style on traffic safety. However, the major problems lie in the introduction and literature review sections.

Detailed comments:

1.        The introduction section is excessively long, and a separate, more in-depth literature review is needed. To my understanding, both 1.1 and 1.2 point to the shortcomings of "impression management" that can result from past research and invoke the need for objective measurement, while neglecting a more detailed review. In particular, in 1.2, there are a number of recent studies on driving styles that are based on objective data, which have not been comprehensively summarized.

2.        A large part of section 1.3 is devoted to describing the data characteristics, and the review of the model is so brief that it does not support the rationale for the selection of the model in this paper. Further, 1.3 does not lead to the Diagonal Inflated Bivariate Poisson Regression used in the article through a review of multivariate count models.

3.        The discussion section can be visualized with some graphs to display the results to make it easier for the reader to understand.

4.        Page 2, line 61, α = .01 should be written in full.

5.        Page 9, line 319, BIDP model should be DIBP?

6.        Could table 3 be adjusted to reduce hyphens.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript entitled “Modeling the Impact of Driving Styles on Crash Severity Level 2 Using SHRP 2 Naturalistic Driving Data” addresses an important topic for driving safety, so it is clearly in the scope of Safety.

1. Have a similar method and study performed before by other researchers? What are your new contributions? These questions are missing in the Introduction.

2. Does the Minimum Acceleration in Table 2 have some significance.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The reviewer comments have been carefully addressed.

Reviewer 2 Report

The revision is generally OK for acceptance in the present form for this journal.