Abstract The main aim of the paper is to find out what factors impact the severity of hazardous material transportation accidents. A total of 1000 hazardous material transportation accident data in China from the year 2015 to the year 2019 are collected as research samples. First of all, through statistical analysis method to describe the time, region, accident type, hazardous materials category, and casualty situation. The analysis show that the accident-prone point is 6:00-8:00 am, accident-prone regions are Jiangsu, Shandong and Shaanxi. Then, this paper analyses the influence of driver, vehicle, road, and environment characteristics on hazardous material transportation accident severity. Since driver behavior variables are numerous and relevant, so, the driver behavior variables are dealt with exploratory factor analysis in this paper. Analysis results show that driving behavior consists of five factors (unintentional errors behavior, aggressive driving behavior, distracted driving behavior, fatigue driving behavior, cognitive errors behavior). Bayesian discriminant method is selected to classify the severity into three categories. Finally, ordinal logit model and multiple logit model are established to analysis the influencing factors of hazardous material transportation accident severity, the two models indicate accident type, hazardous materials category and driver status will affect the severity of the accident, fog and driver's aggressive behavior will increase the severity of the accident. Key words hazardous materials, transportation accidents severity, influence factor, Bayesian discriminant method, Logit model.

CICTP