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Earthquake Impacts on Traffic Safety Using Crowdsourced and Police Reported Accident Data

Description: 

Earthquakes pose significant threats to people and physical infrastructure. However, recent developments of regional earthquake warning systems (e.g., ShakeAlert) have revealed a gap in research on impacts of earthquakes on moving vehicles and drivers. This research integrates earthquake shaking data, crowdsourced Waze navigation application data, and police crash reports to quantify the changes in the likelihood of crashes during seismic events.

The study focuses on earthquakes with at least magnitude 4.0 within the contiguous United States between 2017 and 2023 to align with Waze data availability. An average of the Modified Mercalli Intensity measure of shaking from the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) ShakeMap raster data product is applied over constant road network geographies across the affected areas. These links are then geographically matched with accident and other road hazard reports generated by users of the Waze navigation application. Police crash reports from state agencies are also matched to earthquake-affected road segments. This geographic matching analysis produces a database of over 50 million road network segments that were impacted by the 412 earthquakes. Statistical analysis is used to compare the crash and hazard frequencies after earthquakes to similar time periods throughout the previous year, considering factors such as shaking intensity, roadway types, and crash severity. Specific earthquake events are studied as well, including recent events such the Magnitude 7.0 earthquake off the coast of northern California that resulted in ShakeAlert warnings as well as tsunami warnings being issued in the region.

The findings from this research can inform earthquake early warning alerting strategies, specifically the geographic extent of earthquake warnings. The results may also be used to inform public investment in earthquake emergency response planning, or to predict travel delay times from accidents related to seismic activity.

Session: Performance and Progress of Earthquake Early Warning Systems Around the World - II

Type: Oral

Date: 4/16/2025

Presentation Time: 10:45 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Emma

Student Presenter: No

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