Do maritime safety actions deliver lasting risk reduction? Evidence from AIS-based near-miss analysis using difference-in-differences

Abstract

Maritime administrations frequently implement short-term intensive safety actions to mitigate collision risk in mixed commercial–fishing traffic waters. However, empirical evidence on their effectiveness remains limited because maritime accidents are rare and behavior-level risk indicators are not routinely incorporated into policy evaluation. This study develops an AIS-based evaluation framework that uses monthly near-miss counts as a behavior-level proxy of navigational risk and combines this proxy with a difference-in-differences (DID) design to assess a maritime special safety action in Ningbo–Zhoushan waters. Using large-scale AIS trajectory data, near-miss events are identified based on DCPA and TCPA criteria and then aggregated to the sea area–month level. The analysis covers 9 sea areas from January to December 2023 (108 observations). In the baseline two-way fixed-effects specification, the coefficient on Treat × Post is positive but statistically insignificant (β = 0.4094, SE = 0.2581), indicating that the intervention did not produce robust evidence of a reduction in the AIS-based near-miss indicator. Event-study estimates likewise show no statistically significant persistent dynamic treatment effect within the observation window. These findings suggest that, under the proxy measure and identification strategy used in this study, the special safety action did not generate a clearly identifiable reduction in near-miss counts in treated waters. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the practical value of combining AIS-derived behavioral indicators with quasi-experimental policy evaluation. At the same time, the results should be interpreted with caution, because near-miss counts are structurally related to traffic intensity and traffic composition, and the policy period overlaps with the seasonal fishing moratorium. The proposed framework nevertheless offers a useful basis for evidence-based evaluation of non-engineering maritime safety interventions in complex mixed-traffic environments.