Abstract
Air pollution may decrease drivers’ driving performance thus leading to traffic accidents, but this impact is almost ignored in existing literature. We investigate the short-term effect of air pollution on traffic deaths using the high-dimensional fixed effect model and instrument variable method based on the daily-city panel data in China from 2013 to 2018. The results show that drivers’ short-term exposure to air pollution significantly increases the number of traffic deaths. For every 1 ug/m3 increase of PM2.5 concentration each day, the daily number of traffic deaths will increase by 0.64%. The impacts of air pollution on traffic deaths can last for 2 days. We also find that impact varies from different driver groups.The male, the young (age under 22), the elderly (age over 60), and the two-wheeler drivers are more vulnerable. Worse air pollution may associate with more bad driving behaviors and less good manners. In this article, we reveal a new factor that leads to traffic deaths, i.e., air pollution, and we also put forward some prevention strategies which may provide policy references for traffic safety.
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Data availability
The datasets used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
We will discuss about the validity of thermal inversion as an instrumental variable in the following variables and data part.
AQI is used to measure the concentration of main pollutants, and the most important pollutants in China from 2013 to 2018 are PM2.5 or PM10, so AQI mainly reflects the concentration of particulate pollutants.
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Funding
This paper is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72004170), National Outstanding Youth Science Fund Project of China (Grant No. 71725007), Chinese National Funding of Social Science (Grant No. 19ZDA083), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(Grant No. 2020SK040).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by Daqian Shi, Jie Fu and Hongwei Yu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Ziwei Liu and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Shi, D., Liu, Z., Fu, J. et al. The impact of drivers’ short-term exposure to air pollution on traffic deaths. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 61323–61333 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20230-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20230-0