Accident; analysis and prevention
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This research presents a disaggregated modeling approach for investigating the link between winter road collision occurrence, weather, road surface conditions, traffic exposure, temporal trends and site-specific effects. This approach is unique as it allows for quantification of the safety effects of different winter road maintenance activities at an operational level. ⋯ Most importantly, road surface conditions are identified as one of the major contributing factors, representing the first contribution showing the empirical relationship between safety and road surface conditions at such a disaggregate level. The applicability of the modeling framework is demonstrated using several examples, such as quantification of the benefits of alternative maintenance operations and evaluation of the effects of different service standards using safety as a performance measure.
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Design errors contribute significantly to cost and schedule growth in social infrastructure projects and to engineering failures, which can result in accidents and loss of life. Despite considerable research that has addressed their error causation in construction projects they still remain prevalent. ⋯ A systemic model of error causation is propagated and subsequently used to develop a learning framework for design error prevention. The research suggests that a multitude of strategies should be adopted in congruence to prevent design errors from occurring and so ensure that safety and project performance are ameliorated.
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Comparative Study
Management commitment to safety vs. employee perceived safety training and association with future injury.
The purpose of this study is to explore and examine, specific to the restaurant industry, two important constructs emerging from the safety climate literature: employee perceptions of safety training and management commitment to safety. Are these two separate constructs? Are there both individual- and shared group-level safety perceptions for these two constructs? What are the relationships between these two constructs and future injury outcomes? ⋯ Even though results showed that the correlation between employees'perceived safety training and management commitment to safety was high, confirmatory factor analysis of measurement models showed that two separate factors fit the model better than as two dimensions of a single factor. Homogeneity tests showed that there was a shared perception of the factor of management commitment to safety for the restaurant workers but there was no consistent perception among them for the factor of perceived safety training. Both individual employees'perceived management commitment to safety and perceptions of safety training can predict employees' subsequent injuries above and beyond demographic variables. However, there was no significant relationship between future injury and employees' shared perception of management commitment to safety. Further, our results suggest that the variable of employees'perceived safety training could be a proximal predictor of future injury outcome which mediated the relationship between employees'perceived management commitment to safety (a distal predictor) and injury outcome. We propose that when employees perceive their management as having a high level of commitment to safety, they will also perceive that the safety training of the organization is good, which will then further predict future injury experience of the employees.
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The validity of self-reported seatbelt use among low belt use populations in low belt use countries has not been evaluated directly. Nine hundred and ninety drivers were recruited from shopping centers, car parks, and other suitable locations located in Afyon and Ankara cities of Turkey in order to compare the self-reported and observed seatbelt usage rates. ⋯ When observed, however, only 47% in Afyon and 70% in Ankara of these drivers actually fasten their seat-belts. It seems that the drivers in both cities exaggerated their use seat belts considerably.
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Crash and burn? Vehicle, collision, and driver factors that influence motor vehicle collision fires.
A retrospective population-based case-control study was performed to determine the association between vehicle fires, and vehicle, collision, and driver factors on highways with a posted speed limit of at least 55mph. Data were obtained from the Kentucky Collision Report Analysis for Safer Highways (CRASH) electronic files for 2000-2009 from the Kentucky State Police Records Sections. ⋯ Of the 2096 vehicles that caught fire, there were 632 (30%) non-fatally injured drivers and 224 (11%) fatally injured drivers. The results of this study have the potential to inform public health messages directed to the transportation industry, particularly semi truck drivers, in regard to fire risk.