A detailed knowledge of accidents is essential for defining a road safety policy both nationally and locally. We initially gain our knowledge from analysis reports of injury accidents (BAACs) completed following each accident by the local police service or the gendarmerie. The BAACs bring together various information on the place and circumstances of the accident, the vehicles involved and the victims. These elements are then consolidated by the departmental observatories for road safety (ODSRs) then brought together by the French Road Safety Observatory (ONISR) in order to create the road traffic accidents national database. The statistical analysis of data from the national road traffic accidents database enables us to understand the main characteristics of road traffic accidents and to identify the courses of action to be taken as a priority by evaluating the challenges and the risks associated with each subject. Database analysis is therefore a real tool for facilitating the decision of defining a road safety policy. A road traffic accident cause and process are a complex phenomenon resulting from the person/vehicle/road network system’s dysfunction. The interaction pattern is as follows: the individual takes the information (mainly visually) within the road network and acts within the vehicle, which is travelling along the road (an environment component). This means that the accident data quantitative analysis would not be enough in providing all the necessary elements for comprehension: this should be supplemented by a report on accidents analysis relating to each subject in order to identify the causal factors of accidents and to target more effectively the nature of the actions for tackling these. This is why the annual accident figures produced by the French Road Safety Observatory not only rely on statistics from the National Register of Road Traffic Accidents but also on the elements of knowledge provided by the reports analyses drawn up during various research work. Most of the subjects presented in these figures are about mainland France. Overseas regions specifies make it necessary to analyse them separately. These figures relate essentially to road fatalities, the indicator according to which the quantifiable objectives have been expressed. France’s objective is to half the number of fatalities between 2010 and 2020 and so to bring them to below 2,000 by 2020. The European Union, which set itself a similar objective, is also envisaging setting an objective for reducing the number of persons seriously injured. After having harmonized the definition of “fatality” (a person dying within 30 days of an accident), the EU has adopted as the definition of a seriously injured person, any person with an injury of at least level 3 on the international severity scale AIS (M.AIS 3+). The figures for the year 2012 address certain analyses relating to the accidents severity by using the available indicator in the national register (persons hospitalized for over 24 hours) and available data from the register of the Rhône. (Author/publisher)
Abstract