This dissertation, "Advances in Spatial Analysis of Traffic Crashes: the Identification of Hazardous Road Locations" by Shenjun, Yao, 姚申君, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: The identification of hazardous road locations is important to the improvement of road safety. However, there is still no consensus on the best method of identifying hazardous road locations. While traditional methods, such as the hot spot methodology, focus on the physical distances separating road crashes only, the hot zone methodology takes network contiguity into consideration and treats contiguous road segments as hazardous road locations. Compared with the hot spot method, hot zone methodology is a relatively new direction and there still remain a number of methodological issues in applying the method to the identification of hazardous road locations. Hence, this study aims to provide a GIS-based study on the identification of crash hot zones as hazardous road locations with both link-attribute and event-based approaches. It first explores the general procedures of the two approaches in identifying traffic crash hot zones, and then investigates the characteristics of the two approaches by conducting a range of sensitivity analysis on defining threshold value and crash intensity with both simulated and empirical data. The results suggest that it is better to use a dissolved road network instead of a raw-link-node road network. The segmentation length and the interval of reference points have great impacts on the identification of hot zones, and they are better defined as 100 meters considering the stabilities of the performance. While employing a numerical definition to identify hot zones is a simple and effort-saving approach, using the Monte Carlo method can avoid selection bias in choosing an appropriate number as the threshold value. If the two approaches are compared, it is observed that the link-attribute approach is more likely to cause false negative problem and the event-based approach is prone to false positive problem around road junctions. No matter which method is used, the link-attribute approach requires less computer time in identifying crash hot zones. When a range of environmental variables have to be taken into consideration, the link-attribute approach is superior to the event-based approach in that it is easier for the link-attribute approach to incorporate environmental variables with statistical models. By investigating the hot zone methodology, this research is expected to enrich the theoretical knowledge of the identification of hazardous road locations and to practically provide policy-makers with more information on identifying road hazards. Further research efforts have to be dedicated to the ranking of hot zones and the investigation of false positive and false negative problems. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5043444 Subjects: Traffic accidents - Statistical methods