This report, prepared for the Project Realisatie Transportongevallenraad of the Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, the Netherlands, presents an inventory of information regarding transport safety information that was available in the Netherlands at the end of 1995. The inventory is focused on the registration and recording of transport accidents and incidents in air, rail, road, inland waterway, and maritime transport. lt is organized in two separate ways: by organization processing the information and by database. This inventory of Dutch information regarding transport safety covers all of the obvious information streams and touches upon some of the less-obvious ones. lt represents a wealth of information that could illuminate our understanding of the causes of accidents, both in general and specifically. Much of this information is currently used, but a fair amount has not yet been tapped. There are great differences among and within "report modalities in availability of information, comprehensiveness of data, and freedom of the data-collection process from bias. Some of these differences are inherent in the nature of the of information sought, but others are due more to organizations' standard operating procedures. A fresh look at these practices might have beneficial results. In compiling this inventory of information about transport safety, a number of issues relating to the informational and organizational structure of the TOR arose, including: the need to distinguish between investigation and much and to use both in synthesis, the need to detect causal patterns in accidents, the problem of incomplete denominators in analyses of risk, biases that may result when information collected for one purpose is used for another, and the inherent limitations of restricting one's view of transport safety to one modality at a time. A study of each of these issues would benefit the performance of the TOR.
Abstract