Frontiers in Public Health
Spatiotemporal patterns and driving mechanisms of provincial road traffic accidents in China, 2016–2024
Introduction Road traffic accidents have become a major public health issue of global concern. Methods Drawing on panel data from 31 provincial-level regions in China from 2016 to 2024, this study develops an evaluation framework comprising ten indicators related to transport infrastructure, socioeconomic development, and the natural environment. It employs the imbalance index, geographical concentration index, standard deviational ellipse, spatial autocorrelation analysis, and the geographical detector model to ex …