Which description best defines hotspot analysis in road safety?

• A. A survey of driver opinions
• B. A method to forecast crashes in ten years
• C. A process to calibrate speed cameras
• D. Identify locations where observed crashes exceed what is expected given exposure

Answer: (D)

Hotspot analysis in road safety focuses on locating places where observed crashes exceed what would be expected when you account for exposure, such as traffic volume. By comparing actual crash counts to the number of crashes you’d expect given how much traffic uses a location, you can flag sites where risk is unusually high. This helps decision-makers target safety improvements where they’ll have the most impact, rather than just looking at where crashes are most numerous.

Think of exposure as the context that makes raw crash counts meaningful. A busy intersection may have many crashes simply because it handles a lot of traffic; hotspot analysis looks for locations where the crash rate relative to exposure is high, indicating a genuine safety problem beyond mere volume.

The other ideas describe different activities that don’t identify spatial clusters of risk: surveying driver opinions measures attitudes, forecasting crashes in the long term is predictive modeling without pinpointing hotspots, and calibrating speed cameras is an enforcement/technique rather than identifying where crashes are disproportionately high.