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In line with the new definition introduced by the European Commission (EC), the number of seriously injured road casualties in Germany for 2014 is assessed in this study. The number of MAIS3+ casualties is estimated by two different methodological approaches. The first approach is based on data from the German Inâ€Depth Accident Study (GIDAS), which is closely related to the German Road Traffic Accident Statistics. The second approach is based on data from the German TraumaRegister DGU-® (TRâ€DGU), which includes many more hospitals but not all MAIS3+ injuries.
Test and assessment procedures for passive pedestrian protection based on developments by the European Enhanced Vehicle-safety Committee (EEVC) have been introduced in world-wide regulations and consumer test programmes, with considerable harmonization between these programmes. Nevertheless, latest accident investigations reveal a stagnation of pedestrian fatality numbers on European roads running the risk of not meeting the European Union- goal of halving the number of road fatalities by the year 2020. The branch of external road user safety within the EC-funded research project SENIORS under the HORIZON 2020 framework programme focuses on investigating the benefit of modifications to pedestrian test and assessment procedures and their impactors for vulnerable road users with focus on the elderly. Injury patterns of pedestrians and cyclists derived from the German In-Depth Accident Study (GIDAS) show a trend of AIS 2+ and AIS 3+ injuries getting more relevant for the thorax region in crashes with newer cars (Wisch et al., 2017), while maintaining the relevance for head and lower extremities. Several crash databases from Europe such as GIDAS and the Swedish Traffic Accident Data Acquisition (STRADA) also show that head, thorax and lower extremities are the key affected body regions not only for the average population but in particular for the elderly. Therefore, the SENIORS project is focusing on an improvement of currently available impactors and procedures in terms of biofidelity and injury assessment ability towards a better protection of the affected body regions, incorporating previous results from FP 6 project APROSYS and subsequent studies carried out by BASt. The paper describes the overall methodology to develop revised FE impactor models. Matched human body model and impactor simulations against generic test rigs provide transfer functions that will be used for the derivation of impactor criteria from human injury risk functions for the affected body regions. In a later step, the refined impactors will be validated by simulations against actual vehicle front-ends. Prototyping and adaptation of test and assessment procedures as well as an impact assessment will conclude the work of the project at the final stage. The work will contribute to an improved protection of vulnerable road users focusing on the elderly. The use of advanced human body models to develop applicable assessment criteria for the revised impactors is intended to cope with the paucity of actual biomechanical data focusing on elderly pedestrians. In order to achieve optimized results in the future, the improved test methods need to be implemented within an integrated approach, combining active with passive safety measures. In order to address the developments in road accidents and injury patterns of vulnerable road users, established test and assessment procedures need to be continuously verified and, where needed, to be revised. The demographic change as well as changes in the vehicle fleet, leading to a variation of accident scenarios, injury frequencies and injury patterns of vulnerable road users are addressed by the work provided by the SENIORS project, introducing updated impactors for pedestrian test and assessment procedures.
The incidence of side impacts was investigated from GIDAS data. Both vehicle-fixed object and vehicle-vehicle collisions were analysed as these are enclosed within the consumer testing program. Vehicle-fixed object collisions were stratified according to ESC availability. Results indicated that vehicles equipped with ESC rarely have pure-lateral impacts. An increase in oblique collisions was seen for the vehicles with ESC whereby most vehicle were driving in left curves. The analysis of vehicle-vehicle collisions developed injury risk curves were developed at the AIS3+ injury severity for the vehicle-vehicle side impacts. Results suggested that greatest injury risk occurred when a Pre Euro NCAP vehicle was struck by a Post Euro-NCAP vehicle. The remaining curves did not show different behaviour, indicating that stiffness increased have been equally combated. This was attributable to the few Post Euro-NCAP vehicles that had a deployed curtain airbag available in the sample. The integration of Euro NCAP testing has shown to improve vehicle crashworthiness for pole collisions, as those vehicles with ESC rarely incur lateral impacts.
Interdisciplinary accident research and research projects of AARU Audi Accident Research Unit
(2017)
AARU (Audi Accident Research Unit) is an interdisciplinary research project of the University Hospital Regensburg in cooperation with AUDI AG. Specific objective is to comprehend the respective accident scenario and retrieve generally applicable findings as to technical, medical and psychological processes. In order to prevent traffic accidents and to alleviate vehicle accident consequences, postulates of general traffic safety, human-machine interaction, technical design and function of new vehicles and occupant as well as third party protection shall be inferred from these findings. Specifically, each accident with new Audi, Lamborghini and Ducati vehicles involved is analyzed interdisciplinary, discussed in a case meeting and anonymously documented with more than 2,000 parameters. The database is continually used for solving safety relevant issues. Parallel to accident analysis, research projects are performed in the fields medicine, psychology and engineering in order to gain comprehensive insight and identify potential additional areas of activity of accident research.
In 2016 the seventh ESAR conference (Expert Symposium on Accident Research) was held in Hannover. ESAR is an international convention of experts, who analyze traffic accidents all over the world and discuss their results in this context, conducted at the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover every 2 years. It connected representatives of public authorities, engineers in automotive development and scientists and offers a forum with particular emphasis on In-Depth-Analyses of accident statistics and accident analyses. Special focus is placed on research on the basis of so-called "In-Depth-Accident-Investigations" [data collections at the sites of the accidents], which are characterized by extensive documentations of the sites of the accidents, of the vehicles as well as of the injuries, encompassing several scientific fields. ESAR aims at a multi-disciplinary compilation of scientific results and at discussing them on an international, scientific level. It is thus a scientific colloquium and a platform for exchanging information for all accident researchers. Experiences in accident prevention as well as in the complex field of accident reconstruction are stated and new research fields are added. Existing results of long-term research work in Europe, the US, Australia and Japan include different infrastructural correlations and give findings on population, vehicle population and driver characteristics, which offer a basis for recommendations to be derived and measures for increasing road safety.
In 2011 399 cyclists died in road accidents in Germany and another 76.351 cyclists have been injured. Since 2000 the number of injured or fatally injured cyclists remained on the same high level. Cyclists form 19% of all casualties in German road traffic, although the modal split rate of this transport mode in 2008 was only 10% of trips and resp. 3% of kilometres per day. The high proportion of fatally and seriously injured shows the high vulnerability of cyclists. The demographic shift towards an older population in Germany and the governmental recommendation of increased bicycle use as an ecological, economical and healthy alternative to other modes of transport lead to the assumption that bicycle use especially of elderly people will increase. Based on these facts about the German cyclists' situation a representative survey of 2.000 cyclists was conducted. Results display use patterns and accident involvement on a descriptive level. Overall 7.7% of cyclists report to have been involved in at least one road traffic accident within the last three years. The performed path model analysis reveals an acceptable model fit. Though the explained variance of accident involvement of the applied psychological factors was low, significant relations between several of these factors and especially risky behaviour could be found.
Enhanced protection of pedestrians and cyclists remains on the focus. Besides infrastructural and behavioral aspects it is necessary to exploit technical solutions placed on motorized vehicles. Accident research needs reliable data as well as national road accident statistics. Changing the view on seriously injured road users is one of the challenges which will substantially contribute to the optimization on future traffic safety. The missing accuracy in the definition of personal injury has a detrimental effect on making cost efficient road safety policy which is not only focused on fatal accidents. The European commission requested that, starting in 2015, all EU member states provide more detailed data on the injury status of road casualties, with special regard to the group of seriously injured. Conventional accident data will always be essential. But to obtain detailed data about driver behavior in real traffic situations further data sources are required. These could be EDR data, data from electronic control units, data from traffic surveys and traffic counting, naturalistic diving studies and field operational tests. Gaining insight into normal as well as critical driver behavior will enable accident researchers to deduct functions estimating the increase or decrease of accident risk associated with certain behaviors or vehicle functions. Also with view to the introduction of highly automated driving functions in the future such data is urgently needed. Computer simulation based tools to estimate the benefits of active safety systems are another step on the way towards the safety assessment of automated driving. It is now the duty of the scientific community to ask the right questions, to develop a methodology and to merge all these data sources into a common framework for the assessment of future traffic safety innovations.
Ruptures and dissections of the thoracic and abdominal aortic vessel caused by traffic accidents are rare but potentially life-threatening injuries. They can occur by blunt trauma via seat belt or dashboard injury. The study aimed at evaluating the overall mortality, morbidity, neurological disorders, and differences in operative procedures of open repair and stenting. It shows that, with a change and improvement in diagnostic tools and surgical approach, mortality and morbidity of blunt aortic injuries were significantly reduced. Still an immediate life-threatening injury early diagnosis via multiple-slice and scans and surgical repair with minimally invasive stents showed excellent short-time results for selected patients.
Assessment of the effectiveness of Intersection Assistance Systems at urban and rural accident sites
(2015)
An Intersection Collision Avoidance System is a promising safety system for accident avoidance or injury mitigation at junctions. However, there is still a lack of evidence of the effectiveness, due to the missing real accident data concerning Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. The objective of this study is the assessment of the effectiveness of an Intersection Collision Avoidance System based on real accidents. The method used is called virtual pre-crash simulation. Accidents at junctions were reconstructed by using the numerical simulation software PC-Crashâ„¢. This first simulation is called the baseline simulation. In a second step the vehicles of these accidents were equipped with an Intersection Collision Avoidance System and simulated again. The second simulation is called the system simulation. In the system simulation two different sensors and four different intervention strategies were used, based on a time-to-collision approach. The effectiveness of Intersection Collision Avoidance System has been evaluated by using an assessment function. On average 9% of the reviewed junction accidents could have been avoided within the system simulations. The other simulation results clearly showed a change in the principal direction of force, delta-v and reduction of the injury severity.
The study aimed at estimating the impact of pedelecs (with an assumed higher speed than bicycles) on the traffic accident severity in Germany for different penetration rates. The analysis shows that in many real situations (68%) an electrical support of bicycles has no influence on the sequence of accident events. Taking into account a number of unreported "single bicycle accidents", the adoption of similar traffic behavior and similar age distribution, the authors determined a shift of 400 former slightly to seriously injured cyclists in Germany per year. Overall this would be an increase of approximately 2.3% in case of 10% of pedelec penetration with the pessimistic assumption of 10 km/h speed increase although first natural driving studies predict a much lower average speed increase of pedelecs. The hypothesis verbalized in the initial question whether a higher distribution of pedelecs will result in more severe accidents in Germany is not verified. The study shows that electrical support didn"t result in higher collision speed in general. In many accident situations, the speed of pedelecs has only a minor influence on the accident severity. Further research focusing on a possible change of driver behavior especially in new target groups (elderly people) will be needed.