Dietmar Otte

The development of a European fatal accident database

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 also to support the development of further actions by stakeholders. A recent analysis conducted by the European Transport Safety Council identified that there was no single system in place that could meet all of the needs and that there were major gaps including in-depth crash causation information. This paper describes the process of developing a data collection and analysis system designed to partly fill these gaps. A project team with members from seven countries was set up to devise appropriate variable lists to collect fatal crash data, using retrospective detailed police reports (n = 1300), under the following topic levels: accident, road environment, vehicle and road user. 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. This has major applications in the areas of active safety systems, infrastructure and road safety, as well as for tailoring behavioural interventions.

Possibilities and limitation for protective measures for injury reduction Of vulnerable road users

Abstract Each year in the European Union approximately 17000 vulnerable road users are killed as the result of being struck by a motor vehicle, that is 7000 pedestrians, 3000 bicyclists and 7000 motorcyclists, about 1/3 of the total road traffic deaths. In addition to this, an estimated further five hundred thousand vulnerable road users are injured through vehicle impacts every year, impacted by a car or truck front or side. Much research has been done in Europe, US and Japan in the past to investigate the causes of injuries and the biomechanical mechanisms of impacts in road accidents and it is the task to summarize the existing work to find solutions and measures for injury reduction. Obviously countermeasures can be found on different fields of technique and vehicle design, medicine and treatment and psychology and road infrastructure development, but finding the right focus of safety strategies the interaction between driver behaviour and accident event, vehicle movement and injury occurrence is important to understand. The methodology of accident analysis should used for finding injury mechanisms. The presentation will give an overview of existing interdisciplinary research, include accident and injury statistics and will follow with recommendations for future research. The frequencies and injury severities of different vulnerable road users will be shown for major collision situations and the characteristics of injury mechanisms will be described.

Serious injuries in the traffic accident situation: definition, importance and orientation for countermeasures based on a representative sample of in-depth-accident-cases in Germany

ABSTRACT For many years, there are three groups of injury severity used for describing traffic accident patterns, i.e. minor, severe and fatal. In 2015, the European Commission has committed to set a common EU target for the reduction of the number of seriously injured traffic participants by 2020. This leads to the need of new criteria of seriously injured casualties, for which MAIS 3+ is proposed. A study on a representative accident data collection GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study) was used to calculate the percentages of seriously injured casualties for different kinds of traffic participants based on a statistical random procedure and weighting process in relation to the German national statistics. All injuries (kind, location, AIS) and other accident parameter (deformation, speed, accident types) of the in-depth-accident-sample are documented by a scientific team. Accidents from the years 2009 to 2013 were evaluated for this study. 8,217 accidents with 15,955 participants and 20,083 injured persons of all kind of traffic participants were analysed, 2,000 were severely injured, of these 416 seriously MAIS 3+. The assumption of seriously injured persons except fatalities in traffic accidents for Germany based on GIDAS calculation can be stated as 21% of severe injured persons and as 4% of all injured traffic participants in Germany. The study describes one way to get information (numbers/percentages) of seriously injured casualties based on MAIS 3+ and based on real-world in-depth accident cases. The study gives proposals for countermeasures on further safety issues for avoiding severe injuries, distinguished for different kinds of traffic participants and shows injury characteristics for the help for protective tasks.

Injury Mechanisms of Aortic Ruptures to Vehicle Occupants and Vulnerable Road Users â An In-Depth-Investigation over Time

A rupture of the aorta was a common injury observed in the 60ies and 70ies regarding unprotected car occupants, reported in 10% to 15% of vehicle mortalities in the past. With this study it is investigated how often the Aortic Rupture can be observed in today´s traffic accident scene and what changes happened in the course of time history regarding different kinds of traffic participation and different kinds of injury mechanisms. Based on very well documented in-depth-accident cases by GIDAS (German-In-Depth-Accident-Study) a representative sample of all traffic accidents during a 40 year period (years 1973 to 2014) is available (n>100.000 involved persons) and the cases with Aortic ruptures AR (n=142) are analyzed in detail. The Aortic rupture can be observed in high speed accidents with high body deceleration and direct load to the thorax. Nearly always a high compression of the thorax is responsible for the load direction to the heart vessel. The analysis found load in most cases from caudal-ventral in 26.1% and from ventral 21.1%. Another high percentage could be registered from the left and the right (19.7% each) and 7.5% in roll-over events by vehicles with high thorax compression. The rupture was found mostly classical on the area of the aortic arch into pars descendens caused by a kind of scoop-mechanism and in few cases a hyper flexion mechanism, but never with deceleration effect only. Today the AR is very seldom registered for car occupants (0.1%) and also for cyclists (0.05%), more frequent for pedestrians (0.22%) and motorcyclists (0.23%). Related in the course of time history the focus of AR has to change from car occupants to vulnerable road users. Always the characteristic is linked with high thorax deformation mainly in accident situations under high impact speed, no seatbelt and direct body impact.