4th International Conference on ESAR
Adverse weather could impair the performance of many important parts in road transportation. In a tropical country, the threats posed by the weather phenomenon can be viewed from a different perspective as the situation may not be as extreme as snow-related problems or excessive temperature in other countries. Specifically in Malaysia, the situation may be underestimated due to several reasons such as the deficiencies in accident reporting and lack of research work. This background research has looked into various publications as well as related data to explain the need of more comprehensive research in the future.
The overall purpose of the ASSESS project is to develop a relevant and standardised set of test and assessment methods and associated tools for integrated vehicle safety systems, primarily focussing on currently available pre-crash sensing systems. The first stage of the project was to define casualty relevant accident scenarios so that the test scenarios will be developed based on accident scenarios which currently result in the greatest injury outcome, measured by a combination of casualty severity and casualty frequency. The first analysis stage was completed using data from a range of accident databases, including those which were nationally representative (STATS19, UK and STRADA, SE) and in-depth sources which provided more detailed parameters to characterise the accident scenarios (GIDAS, DE and OTS, UK). A common analysis method was developed in order to compare the data from these different sources, and while the data sets were not completely compatible, the majority of the data was aligned in such a way that allowed a useful comparison to be made. As the ASSESS project focuses on pre-crash sensing systems fitted to passenger cars, the data selected for the analysis was "injury accidents which involved at least one passenger car". The accident data analysis yielded the following ranked list of most relevant accident scenarios: Rank Accident scenario 1 Driving accident - single vehicle loss of control 2 Accidents in longitudinal traffic (same and opposite directions) 3 Accidents with turning vehicle(s) or crossing paths in junctions 4 Accidents involving pedestrians The ranked list highlights the relatively large role played by "accidents in longitudinal traffic", and "accidents with turning vehicle(s) or crossing paths in junctions" (the second and third most prevalent accident scenarios, respectively). The pre-crash systems addressed in ASSESS propose to yield beneficial safety outcomes with specific regard to these accident scenarios. This indicates that the ASSESS project is highly relevant to the current casualty crash problem. In the second stage of the analysis a selection of these accident scenarios were analysed further to define the accident parameters at a more detailed level .This paper describes the analysis approach and results from the first analysis stage.
Accidents with vulnerable road users require special attention within the road safety work because these accidents are often accompanied with severe injuries. Thus In 2006 at least 6200 Powered Two Wheeler (PTW) riders were killed in road crashes in the EU 25 representing 16% of the total number of road deaths while accounting for only 2% of the total kilometers driven. For the prevention of accidents with VRU above all the knowledge of the causes of the accidents is of special importance. This study is based on the methodology of the German In-Depth Accident Study GIDAS. Within GIDAS extensive data on various fields of accidentology are collected on-scene from road traffic accidents with injuries in the Hannover and Dresden area. Using a well defined sample plan the collected data is highly representative to the whole German situation (Brühning et al, Otte et al). The need of in-depth accident causation data in accident research led to the development of a special tool for the collection of such data called ACASS (Accident Causation Analysis with Seven Steps), which was implemented in the GIDAS methodology in 2008 and described by Otte in 2009.
The National Highways Development Project in India is aimed at upgrading over 12,000 km of national highways from 2-lane undivided roads to 4-lane divided roads. With nearly 40% of fatal crashes being reported on national highways, the effect of this project on road safety needs to be assessed. Researchers carried out on-site crash investigations and in-depth crash data collection for a period of 45 to 60 days on four 2-lane undivided highways and a 4-lane divided highway. Based on 76 crashes examined, researchers found a shift of crash pattern from head-on collisions on undivided 2- lane highways to front-rear collisions on divided 4-lane highways. This paper presents the methodology, analysis of crashes examined, and the critical safety problems identified for greater consideration in future highway development projects. This paper also highlights the need and significance of in-depth crash investigations to understand local traffic conditions and problems in India.
An eCall device has been mounted on some vehicles in France since 2003. It is an integrated car radio/GSM/GPS system that can be used with a SIM card. When an accident occurs, a call can be sent manually or automatically made to a telephone call centre. Knowing the geographic location, the vehicle identity and the possibility of a direct communication with the people involved enables the nearest emergency services to be called out. In this context, the LAB / CEESAR have set up a study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of this system. The purpose of this paper is to detail the E-call system evaluation method of effectiveness used and give a global synthesis of the results.
Accident data shows that the vast majority of pedestrian accidents involve a passenger car. A refined method for estimating the potential effectiveness of a technology designed to support the car driver in mitigating or avoiding pedestrian accidents is presented. The basis of the benefit prediction method consists of accident scenario information for pedestrian-passenger car accidents from GIDAS, including vehicle and pedestrian velocities. These real world pedestrian accidents were first reconstructed and the system effectiveness was determined by comparing injury outcome with and without the functionality enabled for each accident. The predictions from Volvo Cars" general Benefit Estimation Model are refined by including the actual system algorithm and sensing models for a relevant car in the simulation environment. The feasibility of the method is proven by a case study on a authentic technology; the Auto Brake functionality in Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection (CWAB-PD). Assuming the system is adopted by all vehicles, the Case Study indicates a 24% reduction in pedestrian fatalities for crashes where the pedestrians were struck by the front of a passenger car.
The paper presents a methodology for the benefit estimation of several secondary safety systems for pedestrians, using the exceptional data depth of GIDAS. A total of 667 frontal pedestrian accidents up to 40kph and more than 500 AIS2+ injuries have been considered. In addition to the severity, affected body region, exact impact point on the vehicle, and the causing part of every injury, the related Euro NCAP test zone was determined. One results of the study is a detailed impact distribution for AIS2+ injuries across the vehicle front. It can be stated, how often a test zone or vehicle part is hit by pedestrians in frontal accidents and which role the ground impact plays. Basing on that, different secondary safety measures can be evaluated by an injury shift method concerning their real world effectiveness. As an example, measures concerning the Euro NCAP pedestrian rating tests have been evaluated. It was analysed which Euro NCAP test zones are the most effective ones. In addition, real test results have been evaluated. Using the presented methodology, other secondary safety like the active bonnet (pop-up bonnet) or a pedestrian airbag measures can be evaluated.
An increased use of bicycles comes along with an increased number of bicycle accidents. Bicycle accidents are more frequent than recorded by the police. To evaluate the real number of bicycle accidents during 12 months in Münster, Germany, injuries were collected by the Police and in each emergency unit anonymously. 2,153 patients had to be treated in a hospital, nearly triple the number of accidents that were registered by the police. Beside fractures of the upper extremities with major surgery, traumatic brain injuries were the leading cause for hospital admission. Bicycle helmet use can reduce traumatic brain injuries and the related number of deaths and hospital admissions. Laws on bicycle helmet might decrease the use of bicycles and therefore the reduction of positive health benefits. Other methods of accident prevention may lead to positive effects as helmet legislation as well, while having no reduction in bicycle use.
Causation patterns and data collection blind spots for fatal intersection accidents in Norway
(2010)
Norwegian fatal intersection accidents from the years 2005-2007 were analysed to identify any causation patterns among their underlying contributing factors, and also to evaluate whether the data collection and documentation procedures used by the Norwegian in-depth investigation teams produces the information necessary to perform causation pattern analysis. A total of 28 fatal accidents were analysed. Details on crash contributing factors for each driver in each crash were first coded using the Driving Reliability and Error Analysis Method (DREAM), and then aggregated based on whether the driver was going straight or turning. Analysis results indicate that turning drivers to a large extent are faced with perception difficulties and unexpected behaviour from the primary conflict vehicle, while at the same time trying to negotiate a demanding traffic situation. Drivers going straight on the other hand have less perception difficulties. Instead, their main problem is that they largely expect turning drivers to yield. When this assumption is violated, they are either slow to react or do not react at all. Contributing factors often pointed to in literature, e.g. high speed, drugs and/or alcohol and inadequate driver training, played a role in 12 of 28 accidents. While this confirms their prevalence, it also indicates that most drivers end up in these situations due to combinations of less auspicious contributing factors. In terms of data collection and documentation, information on blunt end factors (those more distant in time/space, yet important for the development of events) was more limited than information on sharp end factors (those close in time/space to the crash). A possible explanation is that analysts may view some blunt end factors as event circumstances rather than contributing factors in themselves, and therefore do not report them. There was also an asymmetry in terms of reported obstructions to view due to signposts and vegetation. While frequently reported as contributing for turning drivers, they were rarely reported as contributing for their counterparts in the same accidents. This probably reflects an involuntary focus of the analyst on identifying contributing factors for the driver legally held liable, while less attention is paid to the driver judged not at fault. Since who to blame often is irrelevant from a countermeasure development point of view, this underlying investigator mindset needs addressing to avoid future bias in crash investigation reports.
In order to enable foreseeing or comparing the benefit of safety systems or driver assistance systems in Germany, in the United States and in Japan, the traffic accident databases in those three countries are examined. The variables used are culpable party, collision partner, accident type, and injury level and the method to re-classify the databases for comparison are proposed. The result indicates that single passenger car fatality is the most frequent in Germany and in the United States, while passenger car vs. pedestrian is the most frequent fatality scenario in Japan. When the casualty by fatality ratio is focused, the greatest difference is observed in rear-end collisions. The ratio of slight injuries in Japan yields about eighteen times as many as those in Germany, and about eight times as many as those in the United States.
Accidents involving two wheels vehicles represent one of the more important types of accidents in Europe. These accidents are usually not easy to reconstruct specially for the analysis of the injuries and its correlation with accident dynamics and evidences. Different methodologies are applied in this work for the reconstruction of two wheeler accidents, especially accident involving motorcycles. From the typologies of road evidences like skid marks, to the use of Pc-Crash and the use of Madymo models, different reconstruction of real accidents are presented. One of the questions that sometimes arise for legal purposes when some type of head injuries arise is if the occupant was wearing or not a helmet. The correlation of head injuries with the use of the helmet is a very important issue, therefore an important legal aspect. One of the key questions for the reconstructions that is difficult to analyze, is if the vehicle occupant, was or not, wearing the helmet. Based on the previously collected information, a generic model of a helmet was developed on CAD 3D, followed by its conversion into finite elements, all in order to perform impact tests using the Madymo software that would help improve the helmet- safety, but that also can be used as a tool in accident reconstruction.
The need of passive safety devices, able to reduce the accidents and the severity of injuries suffered by motorcyclist, distinctly arises from data on accident statistics. In this paper, the effectiveness of an airbag device fitted in the biker- garments has been verified through various numerical simulations. Two simple test conditions were defined, in order to investigate the performance of the device both for back and front impacts, and simulated at various impact speeds. With the aim of providing more information about the actual capability of the airbag to reduce the severity of the injuries, one of accident scenario described by ISO 13232:2005 has been also investigated, checking the real effectiveness of the airbag strap-based firing system too. Confrontation of injury indexes resulting from simulation with and without airbag made possible a realistic evaluation of the harm reduction induced by the airbag presence.
The NHTSA-sponsored Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) has collected and analyzed crash, vehicle damage, and detailed injury data from over 4000 case occupants who were patients admitted to Level-I trauma centers following involvement in motor vehicle crashes. Since 2005, CIREN has used a methodology known as "BioTab" to analyze and document the causes of injuries resulting from passenger vehicle crashes. BioTab was developed to provide a complete evidenced-based method to describe and document injury causation from in-depth crash investigations with confidence levels assigned to the causes of injury based on the available evidence. This paper describes how the BioTab method is being used in CIREN to leverage the data collected from in-depth crash investigations, and particularly the detailed injury data available in CIREN, to develop evidence-based assessments of injury causation. CIREN case examples are provided to demonstrate the ability of the BioTab method to improve real-world crash/injury data assessment.
Unfortunately, there has been a high number of accident fatalities reported in the Czech Republic in recent years. There are many causes which have led to a growth in the number of road traffic accidents. Since 1990, traffic density has demonstrated an upward moving tendency, daily traffic-jams are on the increase in many cities and traffic capacity on roads and streets is not able to satisfy this increasing density. Moreover, many road users lack experience in terms of driving modern cars. The National Accident Study of the Czech Republic is based on the assumption that the year 2010 is considered as a pilot project with the testing operation of collecting and evaluating data from traffic accidents. From the beginning of 2011, a fully-functional structure of the Traffic Accident Research will be created and solid data generated. Based on this assumption, we hope to begin meaningful cooperation with foreign countries.
A national initiative from the vehicle manufacturers, safety system suppliers, the road administration and universities in Sweden took off in 2007. The aim was to develop a national investigation network and a methodology focusing on all phases of a crash (pre-crash, in-crash and post-crash) as well as all parts of the road transport system (road user, vehicle and road environment). The initiative is formally run as a project with the acronym INTACT (Investigation Network and Accident Collection Techniques). It was a three year pilot with the aim to develop methodologies for an extended national crash investigation activity. During the first year the INTACT partners agreed on the aim for the investigation and methods for retrieving the data were developed. During the second and third year the methodology was tested in real-world investigations and further refinement was made. The paper describes the methodology developed to obtain high qualitative in-depth road crash data.
Pedestrian and cyclist are the most vulnerable road users in traffic crashes. One important aspect of this study was the comparable analysis of the exact impact configuration and the resulting injury patterns of pedestrians and cyclists in view of epidemiology. The secondary aim was assessment of head injury risks and kinematics of adult pedestrian and cyclists in primary and secondary impacts and to correlate the injuries related to physical parameters like HIC value, 3ms linear acceleration, and discuss the technical parameter with injuries observed in real-world accidents based documented real accidents of GIDAS and explains the head injuries by simulated load and impact conditions based on PC-Crash and MADYMO. A subsample of n=402 pedestrians and n=940 bicyclists from GIDAS database, Germany was used for preselection, from which 22 pedestrian and 18 cyclist accidents were selected for reconstruction by initially using PC-Crash to calculate impact conditions, such as vehicle impact velocity, vehicle kinematic sequence and throw out distance. The impact conditions then were employed to identify the initial conditions in simulation of MADYMO reconstruction. The results show that cyclists always suffer lower injury outcomes for the same accident severity. Differences in HIC, head relative impact velocity, 3ms linear contiguous acceleration, maximum angular velocity and acceleration, contact force, throwing distance and head contact timing are shown. The differences of landing conditions in secondary impacts of pedestrians and cyclists are also identified. Injury risk curves were generated by logistic regression model for each predicting physical parameters.
An analysis of NASS and FARS was conducted to determine crash conditions that involved injuries that are not currently being directly addressed by vehicle safety standards or by consumer information test protocols. Analysis of both field data and US NCAP tests were conducted to determine the relative safety provided by seating position and by vehicle model year. Opportunities for improvements were determined by crash categories with large populations of injuries that were not addressed by safety tests or smaller numbers that were increasing in frequency. Areas of opportunities include improved occupant restrain in rollovers, improved frontal protection for rear seat occupants and improved fire prevention in frontal and rollover crashes.
Looking at the total of sum of fatal car accidents the number of single-vehicle accidents and particularly run-offroad (ROR) accidents are most frequent. In Austria on the Autobahn ROR accidents amounts to almost 45% of all fatal accidents, i.e. nearly every second fatal accident is caused by ROR accidents and interaction with infrastructure. Approximately 43 people were killed on Autobahns in ROR accidents with passenger cars. One possibility of protection against impacts with infrastructure is the use of guardrails. However, the initial element identified as a turned down terminal could become a dangerous impact object. These turned down terminals may lead a vehicle to roll over or the car "takes-off" when impacting the turned down guardrail. In many cases it is reported that the vehicle is jumping into road side objects such as traffic sign poles or overpasses. On average, nine people are killed in such accidents every year in Austria.
A total survey of road traffic accidents involving most severely injured, defined as sustaining a polytrauma or severe monotrauma (ISS > 15) or being killed, was conducted over 14 months in a large study region in Germany. Data on injuries, pre-clinical and clinical care, crash circumstances and vehicle damage were obtained both prospectively and retrospectively from trauma centers, dispatch centers, police and fire departments. 149 patients with a polytrauma and eight with a severe monotrauma were recorded altogether. 22 patients died in hospital. Another 76 victims had deceased at the accident scene. In 2008, 49 % of patients treated with life-threatening injuries were car or van occupants, 21 % motorcyclists, 18 % cyclists and 10 % pedestrians. Among fatalities at the scene, vehicle occupants constituted an even larger portion. The number of road users with life-threatening trauma in the region was extrapolated to the German situation. It suggests that 10 % among the "seriously injured" as defined in national accident statistics are surviving accident victims with a polytrauma or severe monotrauma.
Every second counts when human lives are at stake. The increasingly safe design of vehicles presents rescuers with a serious challenge. Faced with high-strength steels and body reinforcements, even the most powerful cutters reach their limits. Therefore, incident commanders require information on the technical features and components installed, directly in the vehicle. Several tests have shown that such information helps to save valuable minutes. Therefore, a standardised A4 "rescue sheet" containing information on the location of cabin reinforcements, the tank, the battery, airbags, gas generators, control units etc. " and indicating adequate cutting points must be used throughout Europe. Hopefully, in a few years, the new eCall emergency call system will be in place everywhere in Europe. The system will transmit the relevant vehicle-specific data directly to the rescuers on-site. Until then, we need a simple and effective solution that saves lives.
Tree impacts are still one of the most important focal points of road deaths in Germany. For the year 2008, the latest figures in the national statistics show a share of 28% of road users killed in crashes with trees alongside a road amongst all crashes on rural roads (except the Autobahn). The official German statistics show the attribute "impact on a tree" since 1995. For this first reported year, the share of road users killed in such crashes was 30%. During the last 14 years, fatal accidents with road users killed on rural roads (except the Autobahn) after impacts on a tree declined by 60% from 1,737 (year 1995) to 696 (year 2008). But this is more or less in line with the general evolution of vehicle and traffic safety in Germany. For Germany as a whole the accident statistics do not show a reduction for "treer crashes" which is clearly more than the average for all accidents. But, as shown with the paper, there are different evolutions in the several German States. In public awareness the topic "tree impacts" is mostly associated with the situation in Germany after the reunification. At that time a lot of road users were killed on the avenues in the so called "new countries". The fact that "tree impacts" are still a big share within the figure of killed road users seems to be little-known. Using updated information coming from the official statistics and in-depth-studies, accident researchers can identify a big potential for further improvements of traffic safety on the associated district roads, state roads and federal highways. There is still a need to analyse more details of the accident occurrence with impacts on trees to generate new and updated findings on the current limits and potentials of measures to improve vehicle and traffic safety. To make further efforts in reducing the figures of victims of "tree impacts" the intensification of well-known conventional solutions " for example implementation of guard rails and reduction of speed - is an option. Measures related to vehicle safety technology especially in the field of primary (active) safety will have additional benefit within the physically imposed limits. With this background it can be seen that the subject "tree impacts" should be analysed with a holistic approach taking into account the entire system of driver, vehicle, road, the environment and a social consensus as well.