At present, there are some 50,000 fatally injured road users each year throughout the 25 EU Member States. A core element of the EC road safety strategy includes a reduction of fatalities by 50% by the year 2010. Central to this strategy is the requirement for good quality in-depth accident data. Such data are seen as a fundamental pre-requisite for the formulation and monitoring of road safety policy in the EU. This document is a methodology development report detailing the task of setting up a fatal accident data collection routine in the seven EU partner countries. The report details how the task will work with existing infrastructure to develop a broad ranging, intermediate level, fatal accident database, and how the data is predominantly being derived from the police records of fatal accident investigations. The document describes the fields of data that will be recorded for each case to provide a description of the whole crash. The report also indicates how the data variables have been determined and how a database for storage of the information has been developed. (Author/publisher)
Abstract