The continued rapid expansion of travel by road has obvious implications for the problems of congestion, pollution, and accident injury. Of these problems, accident injury has so far been tackled most successfully, with rapidly decreasing rates of fatalities and serious injuries in the UK since the mid-1960s. Many aspects of accident work in the research programme of the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) are presented. TRL broadly groups these researches into the partly overlapping classes of Road User Safety (behaviour, education and training), Traffic Safety Engineering, and Vehicle Safety Engineering. Accident data collection is expensive, so that some combination is needed of fairly superficial coverage of large samples and detailed studies of limited samples. UK examples of these are the National Road Accident Statistics database ('Stats19') and TRL's Cooperative Crash Injury Study, respectively. It is essential to understand road user behaviour, and the difficulties of modifying it, because human error is a cause of almost all accidents. Advances in Traffic Safety Engineering include improved skidding resistance of roads and the use of road design to reduce accident probabilities. Vehicle Safety Engineering includes making vehicles safer for their occupants and for people with whom they collide.
Abstract