Sonstige
In 2012 the fifth 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.
A lack of representative European accident data to aid the development of safety policy, regulation and technological advancement is a major obstacle in the European Union. Data are needed to assess the performance of road and vehicle safety and is also needed to support the development of further actions by stakeholders. This short-paper describes the process of developing a data collection and analysis system designed to partly fill these gaps. A project team with members from 7 countries was set up to devise appropriate variable lists to collect fatal crash data under the following topic levels: accident, road environment, vehicle, and road user, using retrospective detailed police reports (n=1,300). The typical level of detail recorded was a minimum of 150 variables for each accident. The project will enable multidisciplinary information on the circumstances of fatal crashes to be interpreted to provide information on a range of causal factors and events surrounding the collisions.
In order to improve the protection of children transported in cars, within the CHILD programme (GR3D-CT2002-00791) real world road accidents are thoroughly analysed and then reconstructed in laboratory. Prior to comparing injury severities of real victims to physical parameter values measured on the dummies, the quality of the reconstructions is evaluated by experts who use their experience based on the investigation of numerous and various accidents. This paper presents a new tool aiming at better evaluating and validating accident reconstructions. It is based on statistical evaluation of vehicle deformations which gives weighing factors for every part of the car body structure finally leading to a specific Reconstruction Quality Score (RQS indicator). Furthermore, the reliability of this score, depending on the number of measured points, can be established. This tool includes a function aiming at adjusting the speed for a further reconstruction and at defining the launching speed and the pulse shape for complementary sled tests. Finally, the functions of the RQS software and database are presented.
An approach to the standardization of accident and injury registration systems (STAIRS) in Europe
(1998)
STAIRS is a European Commission funded study whose aim is to produce a set of guidelines for a harmonised, crash injury database. The need to evaluate the effectiveness of the forthcoming European Union front and side impact directives has emphasised the need for real world crash injury data-sets that can be representative of the crash population throughout Europe. STAIRS will provide a methodology to achieve this. The ultimate aim of STAIRS is to produce a set of data collection tools which will aid decision making on vehicle crashworthiness as well as providing a means to evaluate the effectiveness of safety regulations. This paper will disseminate the up-to-date findings of the group as they try to harmonise their methods. The stage has been reached where studies into the diverse methods of the UK, French and German systems of crash injury investigation have been undertaken. An assessment has already been made of the relationships between the three current systems in order to define the areas of agreement and divergence. The conclusions reached stated that there were many areas that are already closely related and that the differences were only at the detailed level. With the emphasis on secondary safety and injury causation, core data sets were decided upon, taking into account: vehicle description, collision configuration, structural response of vehicles, restraint and airbag performance, child restraint performance, Euro NCAP, pedestrian and vehicle occupant kinematics, injury description and causation. Each variable was studied objectively, the important elements isolated and developed into a form that all partners were agreeable on. A glossary of terms is being developed as the project progresses which includes ISO standards and other definitions from the associated CAREPLUS project, which addresses the comparability of national data sets. A major consideration of the group was the data collection method to be employed. The strengths and weaknesses of each study were investigated to obtain a clear idea of which aspects offered the best way forward. The quality of this information and transference into a common format, as well as the necessary error checking systems to be employed have just been completed and are described. In tandem with this area of study the problem of the statistical relationship of each sample to the national population is also being investigated. The study proposes a mechanism to use a sample of crash injury data to represent the national and international crash injury problem
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.
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.
The Powered Two Wheelers (PTWs) accidents constitute one of the road safety targets in Europe. PTWs users' fatalities represent 15% of EU road fatalities, having increased the last few years, which is quite opposite than other road users casualties. To reduce PTW accidents is necessary to know which the accident causations are from different points of view (human factor, vehicle characteristics, environment, type of accident, situation, etc.). In TRACE project ("Traffic Accident Causation in Europe", under the European Commission 6th Framework Program, 2006-2008,) a specific task was focused on PTW users point of view, analyzing extensive databases to locate the main accident configurations (type of accident, severity, frequency), and an in-depth database to obtain the causation factors, the risk factors for each configuration founded in the extensive databases analysis and the variables associated to each causation factor in the PTW configurations.
The SafetyNet project was formulated in part to address the need for safety oriented European road accident data. One of the main tasks included within the project was the development of a methodology for better understanding of accident causation together with the development of an associated database involving data obtained from on-scene or "nearly onscene" accident investigations. Information from these investigations was complemented by data from follow-up interviews with crash participants to determine critical events and contributory factors to the accident occurrence. A method for classification of accident contributing factors, known as DREAM 3.0, was developed and tested in conjunction with the SafetyNet activities. Collection of data and case analysis for some 1 000 individual crashes have recently been completed and inserted into the database and therefore aggregation analyses of the data are now being undertaken. This paper describes the methodology development, an overview of the database and the initial aggregation analyses.
The need for improved EU level accident information and data was identified in the EU White Paper on Transport Policy (2001)1 and detailed in the Road Safety Action Plan (2003)2. The plan specifies that the EC will develop a road safety observatory to coordinate data collection within an integrated framework.
Data concerning accidents involving personal injury which have been collected in the context of in-depth investigations on scene in the Hannover area since 1973 and in the Dresden area since 1999 represent an important basis for empirical traffic safety research. At national and international level various analyses and comparisons are carried out on the basis of "in-depth data" from the above mentioned investigations. In-depth data play a decisive role e.g. within the validation of EuroNCAP results on secondary safety (crashworthiness) of individual passenger car models. Thus, statistically sound methods of data analysis and population parameter estimation are of high importance. Since the 1st of August 1984 the "in-depth investigations on scene" in the Hannover area have been carried out according to a sampling plan developed by HAUTZINGER in the context of a research project on behalf of BASt. In the meantime a second region of in-depth investigation on scene was added with surveys in Dresden and the surrounding area. Internationally, the acronym GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study) is commonly used for the two above mentioned surveys. The objective of a current research project (topic of this contribution) is, among other things, to examine and adjust the previous weighting and expansion method for the two regional accident investigations to the current general conditions.
In the context of this study, different data sources for accident research were examined regarding their possible data access and evaluated concerning the individual quality and extent of the data. Analyses of accidents require detailed and comprehensive information in particular concerning vehicle damages, injury patterns and descriptions of the accident sequence. The police documentation supplies the basic accident statistics and is amended in the context of the forensic treatment by further information, e.g. by medical and technical appraisals and witness questionings. As a new approach to the data acquisition for the analysis of fatal traffic accidents, the information was made usable which was collected by the police and by the investigations of the public prosecutor. The best strategy for obtaining reliable, extensive and complete data consists of combining the information from these two sources: the very complete, but elementary statistic data of the Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Statistik (Lower Saxony State Authority of Statistics), based on the police documentation as well as the very extensive accident information resulting from the investigation documentation of the public prosecutor after conclusion of the procedure, the so-called Court Records. Of all 715 fatal traffic accidents, which happened in the year 2003 in the German State of Lower Saxony, 238 cases were selected by means of a statistically coincidental selective procedure based on a statistically representative manner (every third accident). These cases cover the investigation documents of the 11 responsible public prosecutor- offices, which were requested and evaluated while preserving the data security. Of the 238 cases 202 cases were available, which were individually coded and stored in a data base using 160 variables. Thus a data base of a sample of representative data for fatal accidents in Lower Saxony was set up. The data base contains extensive information concerning general accident data (35 variables), concerning road and road surface data (30 variables), concerning vehicle-specific data (68 variables) as well as concerning personal and injury data (27 variables).
In an on-going project since 2005, ADAC has been analyzing accidents documented by the ADAC air rescue service. The knowledge derived from real-life accidents serves as a basis for new test configurations and assessment criteria. In 2007, ADAC began looking into the feasibility of international data collection. The idea of Global Accident Prevention was born. Three European partner clubs have begun pioneering the project (ÖAMTC, ANWB, and RACC). The aim is to set up an international accident research network to provide a steady stream of information on road accidents. The FIA Foundation supports ADAC in developing and coordinating this initiative.
76 severe traffic accidents had been investigated in depth in an ongoing Volkswagen-Tongji University joint accident research project in JiaDing district, Shanghai, PR China since June 2005. With a methodology similar to German accident research units in Dresden and Hannover, a research team proceeds to the scene immediately after the incident to investigate and collect various data on environment, accident occurrence, vehicle state and deformations as well as injuries. The data combined with the results of accident reconstruction will be stored in a database for further statistical and casuistic analysis. The first outcome of the project supports the hypothesis that a main causation for the large number of traffic accidents in China is the lacking of risk awareness in Chinese driver behaviour. Low seat-belt use and the high proportion of vulnerable and poorly protected two-wheelers in traffic are reasons for the high injury and fatality rate in China. The research work shows that accident research in China is feasible and able to give support to tackle one of the urging problems in Chinese development.
Nowadays, traffic accidents are recorded in historical databases. Regarding the huge quantity of data, the use of data mining tools is essential to help Experts, for automatically extracting relevant information in order to establish and quantify relations between severity and potential factors of accidents. An innovative approach is here proposed for an in depth investigation of real world accidents data base. Mutual information ratio based on conditional entropies is used to quantity the association strength between an accident outcome descriptor (injury severity) and other potential association factors. Information theoretic methods help to select automatically groups of factors mostly responsible of the severity of accident.
A lot of factors are related to a road traffic accident; particularly human factors such as road use characteristic, driving maneuver characteristic and safety attitude are the major ones. As a random factor is also included, so it is necessary to minimize the contribution of a random factor to identify human factors related to a road traffic accident. There are several standpoints for traffic accident analysis, such as vehicle-based, location-based and driver-based. And it is effective to analyze driver-based traffic accident data for discussion on the relation between human factors and accidents. An integrated traffic accident database system was developed for analysis considering driver- accident and violation records by ITARD, and several studies were carried out for the evaluation. Useful data for discussion on the relation between types of collision and traffic violations, and the effect of accident experience to the following accident were obtained.
This paper reviews briefly the evolution of the investigation of transport accidents from the early beginnings when individual events were studied but systematic data was not collected. In the transport modes other than on the roads, accident investigation early on, even of single events, was important in introducing safety improvements. Road accidents, however, evolved enormously with the growth of car ownership without any comparable political response to the consequent deaths and injuries, equivalent to what happened with the other modes. From the 1950s data bases started to contribute to our knowledge of the epidemiology of road traffic injuries, and in-depth sample studies have contributed much to the body of knowledge in the last 30 years. However, even the basic input and output variables of a crash, its severity and the seriousness of the outcomes in terms of injuries and their consequences are not complete or agreed upon. Issues of experimental design and sampling are discussed. It is proposed that the most important area for current research to address is the effect of population variations on injury outcomes. The need for the establishment of good data bases for active safety issues is emphasised with the consequent need for better links between the research community and the police.
NASS: the glass is half full
(2007)
The National Accident Sampling System (NASS) was born in the late 1970s. It was based on a substantial amount of experience and analysis of what was needed in the United States to understand the safety challenges of our highways. This work also showed how to collect high quality and useful crash data efficiently. Unfortunately, when Ronald Reagan - a President who believed in limited government - was elected, any hope of full funding for NASS was lost. The concept of 75 teams investigating about 18,000 serious crashes in detail annually was never realized. The system got up to 50 teams, then was cut to 36, and finally to 24 teams investigating fewer than a quarter of the originally anticipated number of crashes per year. Despite this, the NASS investigations provide a rich source of data, collected according to a sophisticated statistical sampling system to facilitate detailed national estimates of road casualties on our nation- highways and their causes. In addition, changes have been made in recent years to increase the number of more serious crashes of recent model vehicles to make the results more relevant to improving vehicle safety. A recent, detailed examination of hundreds of rollovers has provided considerable insight into rollover casualties and into what can be done to reduce them. Some of these results will be presented that show the value of the NASS system. Our experience with NASS and the Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) suggests a number of improvements that could be made in the United States" crash data systems. It also provides justification for a doubling or tripling of our national expenditures on crash data collection.
Annually within the European Union, there are over 50,000 road accident fatalities and 2 million other casualties, of which the majority are either the occupants of cars or other road users in collision with a car. The European Commission now has competency for vehicle-based injury countermeasures through the Whole Vehicle Type Approval system. As a result, the Commission has recognised that casualty reduction strategies must be based on a full understanding of the real-world need under European conditions and that the effectiveness of vehicle countermeasures must be properly evaluated. The PENDANT study commenced in January 2003 in order to explore the possibility of developing a co-ordinated set of targeted, in-depth crash data resources to support European Union vehicle and road safety policy. Three main work activity areas (Work Packages) commenced to provide these resources. This paper describes some of the outcomes of Work Package 2 (WP2, In-depth Crash Investigations and Data Analysis). In WP2, some 1,100 investigations of crashes involving injured car occupants were conducted in eight EU countries to a common protocol based on that developed in the STAIRS programme. This paper describes the purposes, methodology and results of WP2. It is expected that the results will be used as a co-ordinated system to inform European vehicle safety policy in a systematic, integrated manner. Furthermore, the results of the data analyses will be exploited further to provide new directions to develop injury countermeasures and regulations.
This paper describes the methodology of In-Depth Investigation in Germany on the example of GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study). Since 1999 in Germany a joint project between FAT (Forschungsvereinigung Automobiltechnik or Automotive Industry Research Association) and BASt (Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen or the Federal Road Research Institute) is being carried out in Hannover and Dresden. The methodology of this project is based on a statistically orientated procedure of data sampling (sampling plan, weighting factors). The paper describes the possibilities of such in-depth investigation on the results of the offered title. The accident cases were collected randomly within GIDAS at Hannover. There are more cases existing from previous investigation started in 1985 under the same methodology. The portion of rollovers can be established at 3.7% of all accidents with casualties in the year 2000. For the study 434 cases of car accidents with rollovers are used for a detail comprehensive analysis. The accidents happened in the years 1994 to 2000 in the Hannover area. The injury distribution will report about 741 occupants with rollover accident event. The presented paper will give an overview of the accident situations following in rollover movements of cars. The distributions of injury frequencies, injury severity AIS for the whole body and for the body regions of occupants will be presented and compared to technical details like the impact speed and the deformation pattern. The speed of the car was determined at the point of rollover and on the point of accident initiency. The characteristics of the kinematics followed in a rollover movement are analyzed and the major defined types of rollover will be shown in the paper. The paper will describe the possibilities of In-Depth Investigation methods for the approach of finding countermeasures on the example of car accidents with rollover and explaining the biomechanics of injuries in rollover movements.
A set of recommendations for pan-European transparent and independent road accident investigations has been developed by the SafetyNet project. The aim of these recommendations is to pave the way for future EU scale accident investigation activities by setting out the necessary steps for establishing safety oriented road accident investigations in Member States. This can be seen as the start of the process for establishing road accident investigations throughout Europe which operate according to a common methodology. The recommendations propose a European Safety Oriented Road Accident Investigation Programme which sets out the procedures that need to be put in place to investigate a sample of every day road accidents. They address four sets of issues; institutional addressing the characteristics of the programme; operational describing the conditions under which data isrncollected; data storage and protection; and reports, countermeasures and the dissemination of data.rn