The identification of mistakes in road accident records: Part 2, casualty variables

doi:10.1016/0001-4575(94)00066-U

Accident Analysis & Prevention

Volume 27, Issue 2, April 1995, Pages 277-282

https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-4575(94)00066-U Get rights and content

Abstract

It has been acknowledged that there are many mistakes in recording the casualty variables on the police accident report forms. This study shows how a computer-based linkage of police and hospital records can be used routinely to identify the mistakes for the variables of casualty age, gender, and severity. The level of omissions and misidentifications were 0.4% for gender, 12.2% for severity, and 15.7% for age. The number of records that had age omitted or coded incorrectly was not significantly greater for seriously injured casualties than for those who were slightly injured. This system could be effectively used to code casualty severity using medical information instead of police judgement.

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Cited by (29)

Risk factors of road accident severity and the development of a new system for prevention: New insights from China
2020, Accident Analysis and Prevention
Citation Excerpt :
In most studies, two main sources of data have been used to investigate the factors that determine accident severity. The first includes data obtained from government offices, administrations or ministries (Manner and Wünsch-Ziegler, 2013; Feng et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2018 among others), which is also known as police-recorded data (Shinar et al., 1983; Austin, 1995; Conche and Tight, 2006; Loo, 2006). The second type of data is obtained from the insurance and reinsurance companies (Krishnan and Carnahan, 1985; Mills and Hambly, 2011).
Road accident fatalities and accident severity costs have become top priorities and concerns for Chinese policymakers. Understanding the principal factors that explain accident severity is considered to be the first step towards the adequate design of an accident prevention strategy. In this paper, we examine the contribution of various types of factors (vehicle, driver and others) in explaining accident severity in China. Unlike previous studies, the analysis gives a particular focus on fatal accidents. Using a large sample of 405,177 observations for 4-wheeled vehicles in the year 2017 and various statistical and econometrics approaches (e.g., OLS, quantile regression and extreme value theory), the results show that the factors explaining the severity of accidents differs significantly between normal and extreme severity accidents, e.g. across quantiles. Interestingly, we find that the gender factor is only significant for fatal accidents. In particular, the analysis shows that male drivers have an increased likelihood of extreme risk taking. On the basis of these empirical findings, a new ratemaking approach that aims to improve road safety and prevention is discussed and proposed.
Errors in accident data, its types, causes and methods of rectification-analysis of the literature
2019, Accident Analysis and Prevention
Citation Excerpt :
Most studies that reported error in recording victim’s information focused primarily on the mis-classification of victim’s injuries. In this area one of the earliest studies done in UK was by Austin (1995b), who reported that the level of error due to omissions and misidentifications in the police reported accident data was 0.4% for gender, 12.2% for severity and 15.7% for age. Upon comparing the values calculated from Giles (2001) with Howard et al. (1979), the level of error related to victim’s information in Australia was found to increase over the period of time.
Most of the decisions taken to improve road safety are based on accident data, which makes it the back bone of any country’s road safety system. Errors in this data will lead to misidentification of black spots and hazardous road segments, projection of false estimates pertinent to accidents and fatality rates, and detection of wrong parameters responsible for accident occurrence, thereby making the entire road safety exercise ineffective. Its extent varies from country to country depending upon various factors. Knowing the type of error in the accident data and the factors causing it enables the application of the correct method for its rectification. Therefore there is a need for a systematic literature review that addresses the topic at a global level. This paper fulfils the above research gap by providing a synthesis of literature for the different types of errors found in the accident data of 46 countries across the six regions of the world. The errors are classified and discussed with respect to each type and analysed with respect to income level; assessment with regard to the magnitude for each type is provided; followed by the different causes that result in their occurrence, and the various methods used to address each type of error. Among high-income countries the extent of error in reporting slight, severe, non-fatal and fatal injury accidents varied between 39–82%, 16–52%, 12–84%, and 0–31% respectively. For middle-income countries the error for the same categories varied between 93–98%, 32.5–96%, 34–99% and 0.5–89.5% respectively. The only four studies available for low-income countries showed that the error in reporting non-fatal and fatal accidents varied between 69–80% and 0–61% respectively. The logistic relation of error in accident data reporting, dichotomised at 50%, indicated that as the income level of a country increases the probability of having less error in accident data also increases. Average error in recording information related to the variables in the categories of location, victim’s information, vehicle’s information, and environment was 27%, 37%, 16% and 19% respectively. Among the causes identified for errors in accident data reporting, Policing System was found to be the most important. Overall 26 causes of errors in accident data were discussed out of which 12 were related to reporting and 14 were related to recording. “Capture-Recapture” was the most widely used method among the 11 different
methods: that can be used for the rectification of under-reporting. There were 12 studies pertinent to the rectification of accident location and almost all of them utilised a Geographical Information System (GIS) platform coupled with a matching algorithm to estimate the correct location. It is recommended that the policing system should be reformed and public awareness should be created to help reduce errors in accident data.
The association of age, sex and helmet use with the risk of death for occupants of two-wheeled motor vehicles involved in traffic crashes in Spain
2010, Accident Analysis and Prevention
Citation Excerpt :
Another potential limitation is that our results may have been affected by gaps in the data from the Spanish traffic crash registry. Although the accuracy and completeness of the registry have not been assessed, we assume that, like other police-based registries (Alsop and Langley, 2001; Austin, 1995; Farmer, 2003), it tends to under-record the occurrence of less severe crashes and those that occur in urban settings (the vast majority of TWMV crashes occur on urban streets and thoroughfares). Therefore subgroups of TWMV occupants associated with a lower joint risk of death after a crash (i.e., females or helmeted occupants) were probably underestimated in the denominator of their corresponding risks of death.
This study was designed to separate the association of age, sex and helmet use with the risk of death for occupants of two-wheeled motor vehicles (TWMV) involved in crashes into its two theoretical components: severity of the crash and occupant resilience.
We analyzed the retrospective cohort comprising all 48 016 pairs of drivers and passengers aged 14 years or more in TWMV involved in crashes with victims in Spain from 1993 to 2007 recorded in the Spanish traffic crash registry. The outcome (death or survival), age, sex and helmet use was known for both occupants. Adjusted relative risks (RR) for the association of age, sex and helmet with the risk of death were calculated with Poisson regression models.
Each 1-year increase in age was related with a 3% increase in the risk of death related with lower resilience. The severity-dependent RR of death was 1.84 for male sex and 0.86 for non-helmet use, and the resilience-dependent RR was 0.72 and 2.53, respectively.
The direction and magnitude of the association between age, sex and helmet use and the risk of death of an occupant of a TWMV involved in a crash changed depending on which component of risk was considered: crash severity or occupant resilience. Specifically, female sex and non-helmet use seemed to be associated with crashes of lower severity, but together with increased age they were also related with lower resilience to the energy released in the crash, and therefore with a higher risk of death after adjustment for crash severity. This should be taken into account when assessing the association of individual factors with the risk of death after a crash.
If you can't take the heat: Influences of temperature on bus accident rates
2008, Safety Science
The influences of heat and rain upon accident risk of city buses in a Swedish town were studied for a 10-year time period, but no reliable effects found, despite the fact that the temperature might be as high as 30 °C outside the vehicles. As the use of single accidents with buses bypasses many of the methodological problems inherent in the study of weather effects on accident rates, for example changes in general traffic density, the present study was a rather strict test of the hypothesis of increased accident risk due to these factors. It was therefore concluded that rain and high temperatures do not increase the risk of accident for low-speed buses in Sweden. However, there could still be an effect of hot weather on bus accidents at higher temperatures than those normally found in Sweden.
Performing chart review studies
2007, Air Medical Journal
Use of CCTV to determine road accident factors in urban areas
2006, Accident Analysis and Prevention
Citation Excerpt :
In Britain, from January 2005, information on contributory factors is routinely collected as part of the national accident data collection system known as STATS 19 (DfT, 2004). Accident data suffer from two main problems: under-reporting (James, 1991; Hopkin, 1993; Austin, 1995a; Simpson, 1996; Dhillon et al., 2001; Alsop and Langley, 2001; Amoros et al., 2006) and inaccuracy. This paper focuses more on the use of video records to enhance the accuracy of our understanding of known accidents, however, it is acknowledged an additional benefit could be that the techniques described will pick up accidents which had not previously been reported to the authorities, though it is unclear how frequently such events may be identifiable.
This paper sets out to assess whether there is a potential use for images collected through the increasingly ubiquitous use of CCTV cameras in urban areas as a means of increasing understanding of the causes of road traffic accidents. Information on causation and contributory factors is essential as a means of understanding why accidents occurred and how the occurrence of similar events may be prevented in the future. CCTV records of accidents could provide an independent perspective on an accident and have the potential to increase both the quality and quantity of information available to the safety researcher.
This study focuses on an area of central Leeds in the UK and shows that an existing CCTV camera system used for urban traffic management reasons has the potential to record around a quarter of the accidents which occur in the area, based on patterns of past occurrence. Most city centres in the UK will have similar camera systems set-up. By the introduction of additional strategically placed cameras and replacement of existing cameras with ones dedicated to accident recording, this figure could be increased substantially.
The paper also considers how effective cameras and video records will be as a means of identifying contributory factor information once an accident is recorded. The contributory factor classification used by a recently introduced system in Britain is assessed in terms of how visible each of the factors is likely to be on video and their relative frequency of occurrence. It is concluded that CCTV has a high potential to provide corroborative evidence about many of the most commonly occurring factors, and to throw further light on accident causation.

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^∗: The author's current address is Halcrow Fox and Associates Ltd, Vineyard House, 44 Brook Green, London W6 7BY, U.K.

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PaperThe identification of mistakes in road accident records: Part 2, casualty variables

Abstract

Accident Analysis & Prevention

Accident Analysis & Prevention

Accident Analysis & Prevention

A linked police and road accident database for Humberside

Traffic Engineering and Control

Paper
The identification of mistakes in road accident records: Part 2, casualty variables