Accident Analysis

To further improve the safety of the highway system, the traffic

engineer must have information and data on the location,
frequency, severity, and types of accidents that are occurring

There can be no hope of determining why such accidents

occur, and of developing corrective measures, unless details
describing their occurrence are recorded

Accidents occur relatively infrequently, and at unpredictable

times and locations, they cannot be objectively observed as
they occur

Thus, all accident data come from secondary sources

motorist and police accident reports
Accident Data Collection and record system procedure:

1. Identification of locations at which unusually high

numbers of accidents occur
2. Detailed information evaluation of high-accident
locations to determine contributing causes of accidents
at the location
3. Development of general statistical measures of
various accident-related factors to give insights into
general trends, common causal factors, driver profiles,
and similar information
4. Development of procedures that allow the
identification of hazards before large numbers of
accidents occur
Types of Statistics

Accident statistics are most often used to quantify and

describe three principal informational elements:

Accident occurrence
Accident involvements
Accident severity
Accident occurrence is generally described in terms of
the types and numbers of accidents that occur, often as
a rate based upon population or vehicle-miles of travel

Involvement statistics often concentrate on which

categories of vehicles and drivers are involved in
accidents, with population-based rates a very popular
method of expressing these statistics
Severity is generally expressed as the numbers of deaths
and/or injuries occurring

Some common statistical analyses include the

examination of:

Trends over time

Stratification by highway type or geometric element
Stratification by driver characteristics
Stratification by contributing cause
Stratification by accident type
Stratification by environmental conditions
Basic Accident Rates

Three types of accident rates are characteristically

computed for most jurisdictions on an annual basis:
a. General accident rates describing total accident
occurrence,
b. Fatality rate describing accident severity. And
c. Involvement rates describing the types of vehicles
and drivers involved in accidents
The listing that follows indicates commonly used rate
bases:

1. Population-Based Accident Rates

Deaths or accidents per 100,000 area population
Deaths or accidents per 10,000 registered vehicles
Deaths or accidents per 10,000 licensed drivers
Deaths or accidents per 1,000 miles of highways

2. Exposure-Based Accident Rates

Deaths or accidents per 100,000,000 vehicle-miles
Deaths or accidents per 10,000,000 vehicle-hours
Deaths or accidents per 1,000,000 entering vehicles
Example:
Consider the following data for City X for the year 1988:

Fatalities: 75
Fatal accident: 60
Injury accidents: 300
PDO accidents: 2000
Total involvements: 4,100
Vehicle-miles: 1,500,000,000
Registered vehicles: 100,000
Licensed drivers: 150,000
Area population: 300,000

The following fatality rates may be computed for City X during the
year 1988, based upon these statistics:
Severity index a widely used statistic for the
description of relative accident severity, defined as the
number of fatalities per accident

The severity index for City X in 1988 is, therefore

SI = 75/2630 = 0.0285 deaths/accident

Seatwork: