Citation

Li D, Zhao Y, Bai Q, Zhou B, Ling H. Traffic Injury Prev. 2017; 18(5): 528-532.

Affiliation

b Highway Bureau of Zhejiang Province , Hangzhou , Zhejiang , CHINA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/15389588.2016.1262950

PMID

27893288

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Though public transport vehicles are rarely involved in mass casualty accidents, when they are, the number of injuries and fatalities is usually high because of large passenger capacity. Of the few studies that have been conducted on bus safety, the majority focused on vehicle safety features, road environmental factors, as well as driver characteristics. Nevertheless, few studies have attempted to investigate the underlying risk factors related to bus occupants. This paper presents an investigation aimed at identifying the risk factors affecting injury severity of bus passengers with different movements.

METHOD: Three different passenger movement types including standing, seated and boarding/alighting were analyzed individually using classification and regression tree (CART) method based on publicly available accident database of Great Britain.

RESULTS: According to the exploratory analyses' results, passenger age and vehicle maneuver are associated with passenger injury severity in all three types of accidents. Moreover, the variable 'skidding and overturning' is associated with injury severity of seated passengers and driver age is correlated with injury severity of standing and boarding/alighting passengers.

CONCLUSIONS: CART method shows its ability to identify and easily explain the complicated patterns affecting passenger injury severity. Several countermeasures to reduce bus passenger injury severity are recommended.

Language: en