Traffic costs of air pollution: the effect of PM 2.5 on traffic violation

Although emerging studies have investigated the effect of air pollution on traffic crashes, it is unclear to scholars whether air pollution affects another road safety problem—traffic violations. To address this gap, the current paper constructs a data set from 1,390,221 traffic violation records of 640,971 drivers from the Wuhan Traffic Management Bureau between January 2018 and December 2018. An ordered logistic regression was conducted to verify our hypotheses. The result shows that PM 2.5 has no overall impact on the severity of traffic violations, but each 1% increase in the daily concentration of PM 2.5 leads to a 1.02-fold increase in the odds of serious inexperience-related violations and a 0.99-fold decrease in the odds of serious overconfidence-related violations. This effect is the strongest in PM 2.5 , followed by NO 2 , and has not been observed in CO and O 3 . In addition, robustness tests indicate that the relationship between air pollution and traffic violations is consistent among the different subsets (e.g., clear weather, no rain and snow, and good visibility). We also provide valuable practical advice for drivers and traffic authorities.