Relationship of pedestrian crash types and passenger vehicle types

Exploring patterns in older pedestrian involved crashes during nighttime

Nighttime crashes involving older pedestrians pose a significant safety concern due to their age-related vulnerabilities such as reduced vision and slower reaction times. This study analyzes crash data from Texas for six years (2017-2022) using Association Rules Mining (ARM) to identify patterns and associations affecting crash severity for older pedestrians aged 65-74 years and those over 74 years under varying lighting conditions. The findings reveal that high-speed limits and complex road environments significantly increase the risk of fatal or severe injuries for both age groups, particularly under inadequate lighting. Additionally, demographic factors, adverse weather conditions, and specific road features further influence crash outcomes. These insights highlight the need for interventions, including lower speed limits, enhanced street lighting, and the implementation of advanced technologies such as modern pedestrian detection systems, sensor technology, pedestrian bags, accessible pedestrian signals, to improve the safety of older pedestrians. Policymakers should leverage these insights to formulate strategies that improve road safety for older pedestrians, addressing their unique vulnerabilities in various nighttime conditions.

A review of truck driver persona construction for safety management

The trucking industry urgently requires comprehensive methods to evaluate driver safety, given the high incidence of serious traffic accidents involving trucks. The concept of a "truck driver persona" emerges as a crucial tool in enhancing driver safety and enabling precise management of road transportation safety. Currently, the road transport sector is only beginning to adopt the user persona approach, and thus the development of such personas for road transport remains an exploratory endeavor. This paper delves into three key aspects: identifying safety risk characteristic parameters, exploring methods for constructing personas and designing safety management interventions. Initially, bibliometric methods are employed to analyze safety risk factors across five domains: truck drivers, vehicles, roads, the environment, and management. This analysis provides the variables necessary to develop personas for road transportation drivers. Existing methods for constructing user personas are then reviewed, with a particular focus on their application in the context of road transportation. Integrating contemporary ideas in persona creation, we propose a framework for developing safety risk personas specific to road transportation drivers. These personas are intended to inform and guide safety management interventions. Moreover, the four stages of driver post-evaluation are integrated into the persona development process, outlining tailored safety management interventions for each stage: pre-post, pre-transit, in-transit, and on-post. These interventions are designed to be orderly and finely tuned. Lastly, we offer optimization recommendations and suggest future research directions based on safety risk factors, persona construction, and safety management interventions. Overall, this paper presents a safety management-oriented research technology system for constructing safety risk personas for truck drivers. We argue that improving the design of the persona index system, driven by big data, and encompassing the entire driver duty cycle-from pre-post to on-post-will significantly enhance truck driver safety. This represents a vital direction for future development in the field.

Vehicle front-end geometry and in-depth pedestrian injury outcomes

OBJECTIVE

Large passenger vehicles have consistently demonstrated an outsized injury risk to pedestrians they strike, particularly those with tall, blunt front ends. However, the specific injuries suffered by pedestrians in these crashes as well as the mechanics of those injuries remain unclear. The current study was conducted to explore how a variety of vehicle measurements affect pedestrian injury outcomes using crash reconstruction and detailed injury attribution.

METHODS

We analyzed 121 pedestrian crashes together with a set of vehicle measurements for each crash: hood leading edge height, bumper lead angle, hood length, hood angle, and windshield angle.

RESULTS

Consistent with past research, having a higher hood leading edge height increased pedestrian injury severity, especially among vehicles with blunt front ends. The poor crash outcomes associated with these vehicles stem from greater injury risk and severity to the torso and hip from these vehicles' front ends and a tendency for them to throw pedestrians forward after impact.

CONCLUSIONS

The combination of vehicle height and a steep bumper lead angle may explain the elevated pedestrian crash severity typically observed among large vehicles.

Walking against traffic and pedestrian injuries in the United Kingdom: new insights

BACKGROUND

Studies from Finland and Taiwan have shown that walking against traffic was beneficial for reducing pedestrian crashes and fatalities. This study examined whether such beneficial effects are consistent across various circumstances.

METHODS

This study aimed to investigate pedestrian fatalities in walking-against or with-traffic crashes by analysing the UK STATS19 crash data for the period between 1991 and 2020. We firstly employed Chi-square tests to examine risk factors for pedestrian injury severity. These variables were then incorporated into stepwise logistic regression models with multiple variables. We subsequently conducted joint effect analysis to investigate whether the beneficial effects of walking against traffic on injury severity vary across different situations.

RESULTS

Our data contained 44,488 pedestrian crashes, of which 16,889 and 27,599 involved pedestrians walking against and with traffic, respectively. Pedestrians involved in with-traffic crashes were more likely to sustain fatalities (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.542; confidence interval [CI] = 1.139-1.927) compared with those in walking against-traffic crashes. The detrimental effect of walking with traffic on fatalities appeared to be more pronounced in darkness-unlit conditions (AOR = 1.48; CI = 1.29-1.70), during midnight hours (00:00-06:59 am) (AOR = 1.60; CI = 1.37-1.87), in rural areas (AOR = 2.20; CI = 1.92-2.51), when pedestrians were elderly (≥ 65 years old) (AOR = 2.65, CI = 2.16-3.26), and when heavy goods vehicles were crash partners (AOR = 1.51, CI = 1.28-1.78).

CONCLUSIONS

Walking against traffic was beneficial in reducing pedestrian fatalities compared with walking with traffic. Furthermore, such a beneficial effect was more pronounced in darkness-unlit conditions, at midnights (00:00-06:59 am), in rural areas, when pedestrians were elderly, and when heavy goods vehicles struck pedestrians.

How can front crash prevention systems address more police-reported crashes in the United States?

Government and consumer-information organizations can motivate automakers to address additional crash types through front crash prevention (FCP) testing programs. This study examined the current state of crashes potentially relevant to current and future FCP systems to provide a roadmap for the next crash types that vehicle testing programs in the United States should evaluate. Crash records from 2016 to 2020 were extracted from the Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Crashes were restricted to ones involving no more than two vehicles where the striking or path-intruding vehicle was a passenger vehicle and a vehicle defect was not coded. Percentages of police-reported crashes, nonfatal-injury crashes, and fatal crashes were computed for different crash types and circumstances. Rear-end and pedestrian crashes evaluated in existing FCP testing programs accounted for 27% of all police-reported crashes, 19% of nonfatal-injury crashes, and 18% of fatal crashes. The remaining crash types relevant to FCP accounted for 25% of police-reported crashes, 31% of nonfatal-injury crashes, and 23% of fatal crashes. A turning passenger vehicle crossing the path of an oncoming vehicle accounted for the largest proportion of the remaining police-reported (8%) and nonfatal-injury crashes (13%). Head-on crashes accounted for the largest proportion of remaining fatal crashes (9%). Most FCP-relevant police-reported crashes occurred on roads with a posted speed limit between 30 and 50 mph. Medium/heavy trucks were the crash partner in a disproportionate number of fatal head-on and rear-end crashes and motorcycles in a disproportionate number of fatal rear-end and turning crossing-path crashes. Fatal bicyclist and pedestrian crashes were overrepresented at night. The findings from this study indicate that testing organizations should evaluate FCP performance at higher speeds; with non-passenger vehicles and vulnerable road users; during the night; and in more complex head-on and turning crash scenarios to reduce crashes of all severities. Some of these conditions are currently assessed by other testing organizations and can be readily adopted by U.S. programs or possibly addressed with new approaches like virtual testing.