Planning sample sizes for before–after accident comparisons

Before‐and‐after safety studies are becoming more desirable in lieu of traditional cross‐sectional studies in establishing crash modification factors, especially after the introduction of the first version of the Highway Safety Manual (2010). We present a simple method for estimating necessary sample sizes to obtain a target precision or power when the effect is represented as a proportional change in a Poisson rate. We also show that necessary sample sizes are not very different when full Bayesian models are implemented.