Emergency vehicle drivers are generally more highly trained than other drivers. However their task can be significantly more demanding, such as the occasional but unpredictable need to travel at high speed, the need to operate communications equipment while driving, etc. The public also expects them to set the highest example of driving behaviour, and a crash, particularly while driving at speed, is considered very newsworthy. Such a high profile may make incidents involving emergency vehicles seem more common to the public than they actually are. Making comparisons between emergency service vehicle crashes and “ordinary” vehicle crashes, such as police car crashes versus all other car crashes, is problematic. In this paper, crashes of vehicles classified as belonging to specific emergency service fleets were analysed on their own and in comparison to similar, non-emergency fleet vehicles that had also crashed. Analyses were conducted for crash-related variables, driver-related variables, and behaviour-related variables. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E214057. Printed volume contains peer-reviewed papers. CD-ROM contains submitted papers.
Abstract