One of the primary objects of studying the causation of accidents is to assist us to increase and improve the effective effort devoted to road accident prevention. While much has been done in the way of keeping down accident frequency, a lot more needs to be done and by studying accidents which have happened and applying the lessons learnt from them further progress will be made. Having put the problem in this form, we want to distinguish two types of investigation in which the idea of causation comes into the picture and these are as follows: (1) Finding the causes of, or factors contributing to, individual accidents; we describe this as the individual inquest method. (2) Finding the way in which accident frequency varies in different conditions, i.e., the factors causing changes in accident frequency. We call this the accident frequency method.
Abstract