TY - JOUR PY - 2013// TI - Identifying the causes of road crashes in Europe JO - Annals of advances in automotive medicine A1 - Thomas, Pete A1 - Morris, Andrew A1 - Talbot, Rachel A1 - Fagerlind, Helen SP - 13 EP - 22 VL - 57 IS - N2 - This research applies a recently developed model of accident causation, developed to investigate industrial accidents, to a specially gathered sample of 997 crashes investigated in-depth in 6 countries. Based on the work of Hollnagel the model considers a collision to be a consequence of a breakdown in the interaction between road users, vehicles and the organisation of the traffic environment. 54% of road users experienced interpretation errors while 44% made observation errors and 37% planning errors. In contrast to other studies only 11% of drivers were identified as distracted and 8% inattentive. There was remarkably little variation in these errors between the main road user types. The application of the model to future in-depth crash studies offers the opportunity to identify new measures to improve safety and to mitigate the social impact of collisions. Examples given include the potential value of co-driver advisory technologies to reduce observation errors and predictive technologies to avoid conflicting interactions between road users.

LA - en SN - 1943-2461 UR - http://dx.doi.org/ ID - ref1 ER -