A Comparative Forecast of Road Traffic Fatalities in Thailand: A Case Study with and without the Impact of COVID-19

Abstract

Road traffic accidents in Thailand remain a major issue, causing significant loss of life and property. The current Road Safety Master Plan (2022–2027) serves as a key strategic framework, with targets set based on data from the year 2020, a period when Thailand and many other countries implemented strict measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic, which consequently affected road accident statistics. This study aims to analyze and predict the number of fatalities caused by road traffic accidents under two scenarios, with and without the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis uses mortality data from 2011 to 2023, obtained from three national mortality databases maintained by the Ministry of Public Health. Time series analysis is employed using the Winter’s Exponential Smoothing Method, with forecasts generated for each of Thailand’s 77 provinces. The actual death data from 2022 and 2023 are used to evaluate forecasting accuracy using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The results indicate that the analysis under the assumption of no COVID-19 impact yields significantly higher accuracy for both years. In 2022, the RMSE and MAPE values were below 122.04 and 5.77, respectively, while in 2023, these values were below 143.52 and 9.16. These findings suggest that excluding anomalous periods from the dataset leads to more accurate results, making the analysis more suitable for refining the target indicators of the Road Safety Master Plan in alignment with local contexts