POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF ACCIDENT ANALYSIS
Keyword：Consequences; purposes; describe; Limitations; concerned; Accident Analysis; possibilities
Abstraet：Accident statistics, especially collected at a national level are particularly useful for the description, monitoring and prognosis of accident developments, the detection of positive and negative safety developments, the definition of safety targets and the (product) evaluation of long term and large scale safety measures. The application of accident analysis is strongly limited for problem analysis, prospective and retrospective safety analysis on newly developed traffic systems or safety measures, as well as for (process) evaluation of special short term and small scale safety measures. There is an urgent need for the analysis of accidents in real time, in combination with background behavioural research. Automatic incident detection, combined with video recording of accidents may soon result in financially acceptable research. This type of research may eventually lead to a better understanding of the concept of risk in traffic and to well-established theories.
1. Introduction.
This paper is primarily based on personal experience concerning traffic safety, safety research and the role of accidents analysis in this research. These experiences resulted in rather philosophical opinions as well as more practical viewpoints on research methodology and statistical analysis. A number of these findings are published already elsewhere.
From this lack of direct observation of accidents, a number of methodological problems arise, leading to continuous discussions about the interpretation of findings that cannot be tested directly. For a fruitful discussion of these methodological problems it is very informative to look at a real accident on video. It then turns out that most of the relevant information used to explain the accident will be missing in the accident record. In-depth studies also cannot recollect all the data that is necessary in order to test hypotheses about the occurrence of the accident.For a particular car-car accident, that was recorded on video at an urban intersection in the Netherlands, between a car coming from a minor road, colliding with a car on the major road, the following questions could be asked:Why did the driver of the car coming from the minor road, suddenly accelerate after coming almost to a stop and hit the side of the car from the left at the main road? Why was the approaching car not noticed? Was it because the driver was preoccupied with the two cars coming from the right and the gap before them that offered him the possibility to cross? Did he look left before, but was his view possibly blocked by the green van parked at the corner? Certainly the traffic situation was not complicated. At the moment of the accident there were no bicyclists or pedestrians present to distract his attention at the regularly overcrowded intersection. The parked green van disappeared within five minutes, the two other cars that may have been important left without a trace. It is hardly possible to observe traffic behaviour under the most relevant condition of an accident occurring, because accidents are very rare events, given the large number of trips. Given the new video equipment and the recent developments in automatic incident and accident detection, it becomes more and more realistic to collect such data at not too high costs. Additional to this type of data that is most essential for a good understanding of the risk increasing factors in traffic, it also important to look at normal traffic behaviour as a reference base. The question about the possibilities and limitations of accident analysis is not lightly answered. We cannot speak unambiguously about accident analysis. Accident analysis covers a whole range of activities, each originating from a different background and based on different sources of information: national data banks, additional information from other sources, specially collected accident data, behavioural background data etc. To answer the question about the possibilities and limitations, we first have to look at the cycle of activities in the area of traffic safety. Some of these activities are mainly concerned with the safety management of the traffic system, some others are primarily research activities.
The following steps should be distinguished:
- detection of new or remaining safety problems;
- description of the problem and its main characteristics;
- the analysis of the problem, its causes and suggestions for improvement;
- selection and implementation of safety measures;
- evaluation of measures taken.
Although this cycle can be carried out by the same person or group of persons, the problem has a different (political/managerial or scientific) background at each stage. We will describe the phases in which accident analysis is used. It is important to make this distinction. Many fruitless discussions about the method of analysis result from ignoring this distinction. Politicians, or road managers are not primarily interested in individual accidents. From their perspective accidents are often treated equally, because the total outcome is much more important than the whole chain of events leading to each individual accident. Therefore, each accident counts as one and they add up all together to a final safety result.
Researchers are much more interested in the chain of events leading to an individual accident. They want to get detailed information about each accident, to detect its causes and the relevant conditions. The politician wants only those details that direct his actions. At the highest level this is the decrease in the total number of accidents. The main source of information is the national database and its statistical treatment. For h
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