Identifying the causes of road crashes in Europe
Paper in proceeding, 2013

This research applies a recently developed model of accident causation, developed to investigate industrial accidents, to a specially gathered sample of 997 crashes investigated in-depth in 6 countries. Based on the work of Hollnagel the model considers a collision to be a consequence of a breakdown in the interaction between road users, vehicles and the organisation of the traffic environment. 54% of road users experienced interpretation errors while 44% made observation errors and 37% planning errors. In contrast to other studies only 11% of drivers were identified as distracted and 8% inattentive. There was remarkably little variation in these errors between the main road user types. The application of the model to future in-depth crash studies offers the opportunity to identify new measures to improve safety and to mitigate the social impact of collisions. Examples given include the potential value of co-driver advisory technologies to reduce observation errors and predictive technologies to avoid conflicting interactions between road users. © Annals of Advances in Automotive Medicine.

Industrial accident

Developed model

Traffic environment

Interpretation errors

Accident causation

Observation errors

Potential values

Planning error

Author

Pete Thomas

Andrew Morris

Rachel Talbot

Helen Fagerlind

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Vehicle Safety

Annals of Advances in Automotive Medicine

1943-2461 (ISSN)

Vol. 57 13-22

Areas of Advance

Transport

Subject Categories

Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology)

Vehicle Engineering

More information

Created

10/7/2017