The project ASTERYX aims at Assessing The European Road SafetY Problem – by way of an eXploitation study of the CARE Database (Community Database on Accidents on Roads in Europe). A consortium of four European road safety research institutes carried out– for the first time – detailed Trans-European accident research using the CARE database of the European Commission (DG TREN). The project considers the following issues: * Analyse capabilities and limitations of CARE and its overall potential added value for the road safety research community; * Evaluate user guidance and handling of CARE-II, i.e. the version of the CARE database currently in operation (aspects of user interface, help functions and glossaries); * Highlight possible flaws by misinterpreting or misuse of data, especially when comparing data from different Member States and give recommendations for further development of CARE-II; * Give hands-on advice and examples in the use of CARE; and * Detect some Member States’ specific characteristics in accident patterns, using the list of variables made available in the EU project CARE PLUS, funded by the European Commission. The case study in hand is dealing with accidents involving lorries in Europe, based on data retrieved from the Community Road Accident Database ”CARE”. The number of lorries on European roads is increasing, and the forthcoming expansion of the European Union is likely to further boost this development. Studying the characteristics and trend developments of lorry accidents is of great interest for future decision making in EU goods transport politics and to tackle the problems of typical transit countries like Austria. Investigating country specific differences provides a good insight into the problem and renders a better understanding of the area. The CARE Database has a high potential to be a very useful tool for research in the traffic safety field because of the fact that CARE uses disaggregated data as opposed to other international databases. Therefore, it is possible to carry out more detailed and specific queries than with other comparable data sources. In this study the authors initially tried to arrive at results just by retrieving data from CARE as is. While the study was carried out, some irregularities in specific country data where revealed. After a thorough logical check of data, it turned out that the CARE Database currently provides no reliable results in the field of lorry accidents. Thus, the design of this case study had to be slightly modified in order to objectively describe the types of data quality problems encountered.(Author/publisher) For the other ASTERYX reports see http://ec.europa.eu/transport/roadsafety/publications/projectfiles/aste…
Abstract