Is traffic accident related to air pollution? A case report from an island of Taihu Lake, China

Air pollution has negative short- and long-term impacts on humans, particularly in terms of health, mood, cognition, and behavior. Air pollution may affect driving behavior through psychological and physiological pathways and cause the haze to reduce visibility of road. Our objective here is to explore whether daily traffic accident is related to the environmental air pollutant while other factors, including weather and time variables, are controlled. We used particulate matters (PM10 and PM2.5, which are the two main air pollutants in China) to quantify air pollution. We collected daily traffic accident data of a small island of Taihu Lake, in Suzhou City, China. Four types of count models, namely, Poisson, negative binomial (NB), zero-inflated Poisson, and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression were applied to fit data. PM10 and PM2.5 were respectively included in the four count models. The four models revealed a similar result that daily traffic accident was positively related to PM10 and PM2.5. If PM10 and PM2.5 increased from the Chinese Ambient Air Quality Standards-Grade I to Grade Ⅱ, then traffic accidents increased by nearly 35% and 11.1%.Our results confirmed that daily risk of traffic accident was related to PM (PM10 and PM2.5) and increase the social burden. But the possible psychological and physiological pathways should be further studied.