Accident; analysis and prevention
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Driver sleepiness is a prevalent phenomenon among professional drivers working unconventional and irregular hours. For compromising occupational and traffic safety, sleepiness has become one of the major conundrums of road transportation. To further elucidate the phenomenon, an on-road study canvassing the under-explored relationship between working hours and sleepiness, sleep, and use of sleepiness countermeasures during and outside statutory rest breaks was conducted. ⋯ No statistically significant association was found between shift type and use of efficient sleepiness countermeasures during statutory rest breaks. In all, the findings demonstrate marked differences in the occurrence of severe sleepiness at the wheel, sleep preceding duty hours, and the use of sleepiness countermeasures between different shift types. In addition, although drivers slept reasonably well in connection with different shift types, the findings imply there is still room for improvement in alertness management among this group of employees.
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Current information on the safety of rear row occupants of all ages is needed to inform further advances in rear seat restraint system design and testing. The objectives of this study were to describe characteristics of occupants in the front and rear rows of model year 2000 and newer vehicles involved in crashes and determine the risk of serious injury for restrained crash-involved rear row occupants and the relative risk of fatal injury for restrained rear row vs. front passenger seat occupants by age group, impact direction, and vehicle model year. ⋯ Results of this study extend prior research on the relative safety of the rear seat compared with the front by examining a more contemporary fleet of vehicles. The rear row is primarily occupied by children and adolescents, but the variable relative risk of death in the rear compared with the front seat for occupants of different age groups highlights the challenges in providing optimal protection to a wide range of rear seat occupants. Findings of an elevated risk of death for rear row occupants, as compared with front row passengers, in the newest model year vehicles provides further evidence that rear seat safety is not keeping pace with advances in the front seat.
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This study investigates which crash characteristics influence the probability that the crash is reported in the television news. To this purpose, all news items from the period 2006-2012 about traffic crashes from the prime time news of two Belgian television channels are linked to the official injury crash database. Logistic regression models are built for the database of all injury crashes and for the subset of fatal crashes to identify crash characteristics that correlate with a lower or higher probability of being reported in the news. ⋯ Furthermore, crashes involving a bus have a significantly higher probability of being reported in the news, while crashes involving a motorcycle have a significantly lower probability. Some models also indicate a lower reporting rate of crashes involving a moped, and a higher reporting rate of crashes involving heavy goods vehicles. These biases in media reporting can create skewed perceptions in the general public about the prevalence of traffic crashes and eventually may influence people's behaviour.
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The aim of the study was to examine the prevalence of alcohol and drugs in blood samples from motorcycle riders who died in road crashes in Norway from 2001 to 2010. An additional aim was to compare the prevalence of alcohol and drugs in blood samples from fatally injured motorcycle riders and car drivers who died during the same time period. Blood samples from motorcycle riders who died within 24h after the accident (n=207, 63% of all killed riders), were analysed for alcohol, psychoactive drugs (medicinal and illicit drugs). ⋯ Alcohol and drugs were less often found in samples from killed motorcycles riders than in samples from car and van drivers (40.2 percent). For single-vehicle accidents, the total prevalence of alcohol or drugs among killed motorcycles riders and car drivers was 44.6 percent and 63.8 percent, respectively. The same pattern of alcohol and drugs was found among the two groups, except that the prevalence among motorcycle riders was lower compared to car drivers in all age groups and time periods, which may be related to the fact that they are more vulnerable for fatal injury compared to car drivers in similar accidents.
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Older drivers are at increased risk of crash involvement per mile traveled. The purpose of this study was to examine older driver errors in serious crashes to determine which errors are most prevalent. ⋯ Efforts to reduce older driver crash involvements should focus on diminishing the likelihood of the most common driver errors. Countermeasures that simplify or remove the need to make left turns across traffic such as roundabouts, protected left turn signals, and diverging diamond intersection designs could decrease the frequency of inadequate surveillance and gap or speed misjudgment errors. In the future, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications may also help protect older drivers from these errors.