Accident causation and pre-accidental driving situations: Part 1. Overview and general statistics

Abstract

WP2 of the European Project TRACE is concerned with “Types of Situations” to analyse the causation\nof road traffic accidents from the pre-accidental driving situation point of view. Four complementary\nsituations were defined: stabilized situations, intersection, specific manoeuvre and degradation\nscenario. To reach this objective, the analysis is based on a common methodology composed on 3\nsteps: the “descriptive analysis” which from general statistics will allow to identify among the studied\nsituations those them relevant and to give their characteristics, the “in-depth analysis” allowing to\nobtain accident causes from the generic description of the problems identified in the previous step and\nthe risk analysis identifying the risk of being involved in an accident taking into account the results\nobtained from the ‘in–depth’ level.\nThis report is dedicated to the descriptive analysis with the identification of the most relevant scenario\nregarding the situation in which the driver is involved just prior the accident. The results are based on\nthe literature review, general statistics and the analysis of the national databases available in TRACE\nvia WP8. Because the information level differ from databases to another, the available scenario\npresented here for the 4 predefined types of situations are generics and some specific situations could\nnot have be distinguished. For each situation some key indicators are given, such as prevalence,\nseverity, KSI (killed x severely injured), etc. When it is possible, these indicators are estimated at the\nEU27 level.