Analyzing traffic violation behavior at urban intersections: A spatiotemporal kernel density estimation approach using automated enforcement system data

The Automated Enforcement System (AES) has become the most important traffic enforcement system in China. In this study, a spatio-temporal kernel density estimation (STKDE) model, integrating spatio-temporal statistics and three-dimensional visualization techniques, was applied to reveal the spatial and temporal patterns of traffic violation behavior at urban intersections. The multivariate Gaussian kernel function was selected for space and time density estimation, as it has been shown to be a good arbitrary probability density function for continuous multivariate data. Because the STKDE model builds a space-time cube that adopts different colors of voxels to visualize the density of traffic violations, an optimal bandwidth selector that combines unconstrained pilot bandwidth matrices with a data-driven method was selected for achieving the best visualization result. The raw AES traffic violation data over 200 weekdays from 69 intersections in the city of Wujiang were empirically analyzed. The results show that the STKDE space-time cube made it easier to detect the spatio-temporal patterns of traffic violations than did the traditional hotspots map. An interesting finding was that traffic sign violations and traffic marking violations were primarily concentrated not in regular peak hours, but during the time period of 14:00-16:00, which indicates that these intersections were the most congested during this period. Primarily, the STKDE model identified seven patterns of spatio-temporal traffic violation hotspots and coldspots. These results are important because their prediction of temporal trends of traffic violations may help contribute toward the understanding and improvement of intersection safety problems.