On 5 October 1999, near London Paddington Station, two trains collided on a main line near Ladbroke Grove. The immediate "human error" that preceded this crash was a Signal Passed At Danger (SPAD). Thirty-one people lost their lives and many more were injured. The crash prompted an extensive multi-disciplinary investigation and hearing to identify the factors that contributed to the Signal Pass...

Motor vehicle crashes are one of the leading causes of death among young Americans. They also experience higher percentage of single vehicle, Run-off-the-road (ROR) crashes compared to other drivers. When looking at the methods of improving the alarming death rate of young drivers, it is important to identify the determinants of higher crash and injury severity. With that intention, the study d...

This paper highlights evidence from several instrumented vehicle studies that crash risk varies significantly among commercial truck drivers, and also cites findings from surveys of fleet safety managers and other experts on the topic of individual differences in commercial driver crash risk. Within various subject groups, 10-15% of the drivers typically account for 30-50% of the crash risk. Th...

The Haddon matrix is a tool that can improve our understanding of what actually happens in a critical incident, and also can guide the development of countermeasures to prevent or minimise the damage from those critical incidents. In the context of a road crash as a critical incident, many factors are influential, increasing or decreasing survivability. These can be classified as pre-crash fact...

Using data from i) a self-administered survey of 673 older female drivers, and ii) a case-control study of 48 crash-involved and 44 non crash-involved older female drivers, some factors that may predict crash involvement were identified. Survey data gathered self-reported information on demographic characteristics, health status, travel patterns and driving practices. A battery of functional pe...

Although speed is considered to be one of the main crash contributory factors, research findings are inconsistent. Independent of the robustness of their statistical approaches, crash frequency models typically employ crash data that are aggregated using spatial criteria (e.g., crash counts by link termed as a link-based approach). In this approach, the variability in crashes between links is e...

A study of fatal traffic crashes in Florida examined contributing factors among crashes in which younger (under age 25) drivers were found to be at fault. A case-based analysis was used to improve the accuracy and completeness of the data from the original crash reports. Results were presented using over-representation factors (ORB), a simplified but statistically significant approach to freque...

To approach the goal of "Toward Zero Deaths," there is a need to develop an analysis paradigm to better understand the effects of a countermeasure on reducing the number of severe crashes. One of the goals in traffic safety research is to search for an effective treatment to reduce fatal and major injury crashes, referred to as severe crashes. To achieve this goal, the selection of promising co...