## Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Estonian Research Council (grant no. PRG 2022‑001) and the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme (project “SaferRoads”, grant agreement No 101123456). We thank the Estonian Road Administration for providing the daily traffic‑volume and accident data used in this study, as well as the Statistics Estonia team for assistance with data preprocessing. Special appreciation is extended to Dr. Katrin Pärn and Prof. Jaan Kallas for their insightful comments on the manuscript’s methodological design, and to two anonymous reviewers whose constructive feedback greatly improved the clarity of our arguments. Finally, we acknowledge the contributions of the research assistants who performed the data cleaning and coding work that made this analysis possible.