Abstract:The paper aims to study the relationship between rearend crash potential and lanelevel traffic data collected by single pair of loop detectors located on the G60 Freeway in Shanghai, China. The matched casecontrol method with support vector machines was applied to modelling the traffic data of different time slices before the crashes respectively, 5~10minutes, 10~15 minutes and 15~20 minutes before the crash. Results indicate that support vector machines classifiers based on the traffic data of 5~10 minutes before the crashes have the highest crash prediction accuracy of 84.85% and a false alarming rate 0.33%. The model proves to be valid to predict the realtime crash risk, which is helpful in freeway traffic management.