Coaches and road safety : safety of coaches and cars compared. This report presents a study into the safety of coaches in traffic, commissioned by the Royal Dutch Association of Transport Companies (KNV). This study uses data supplied by several organisations in the Netherlands: Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the road crash registration by the police (BRON), the hospital register of road crash casualties (LBZ), and data from the KNV-brochure Core data 2015 of the Coach transport sector in the Netherlands (Kerncijfers 2015 van het Nederlandse touringcarvervoer). For international data the Community Road Accident Database (CARE) was used; this data is maintained by the European Commission. The available data does not distinguish between coaches and public transport buses. Therefore, we studied the umbrella category “buses” and compared its road safety with that of (passenger) cars. Within the umbrella category "buses" there may be differences between coaches and public transport buses. Public transport buses mainly drive in the city, where crashes are more frequent than on the motorway. Coaches probably drive a larger proportion of their journeys on motorways. In addition, vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and (light) moped riders in the city may come into contact with a public transport bus. On the motorway, where coaches probably drive a greater part of the time, these vulnerable road users are absent. Furthermore, public transport buses also carry standing passengers, which increases the risk of injury to the passengers in the case of hard braking or a collision. Coaches do not carry standing passengers. Furthermore, public transport buses travel the vast majority of their kilometres in the Netherlands and they travel a much greater total distance than coaches. Coaches also travel far fewer days a year than public transport buses. It is therefore most likely that coaches as a category are safer than the public transport buses and coaches combined in the category buses in this study. However, it is not easy to determine how much safer this would be. The comparison between buses and passenger cars was made for Dutch vehicles that had been involved in a serious crash in the Netherlands. For the number of road deaths we looked at the period 1993-2014. Fewer data was available for the number of serious road injuries and only the period 1993-2009 was studied. In absolute numbers, there are far fewer road deaths in crashes involving buses than in crashes involving passenger cars. This is due to the fact that passenger cars have a much greater mobility than buses. Also when we take this mobility into account, the risk (the number of road deaths per distance travelled) of dying as a bus passenger is smaller than the risk of dying as a car occupant. Averaged over the period 1993-2014 the risk of a fatal crash for a bus passenger is 0.15 per billion km travelled as opposed to a risk of 2.3 for a car occupant. However, the risk of dying in a crash with a bus as a crash opponent is greater than the risk of dying in a crash with a car as the crash opponent. For cars and buses as crash opponents, the average risk per billion km travelled is 30 road deaths in crashes involving a bus as opposed to 3.9 road deaths in crashes involving a passenger car. This indicates that crashes with a bus as the crash opponent are fatal much more frequently than crashes with a passenger car: there are 18 times more road deaths among crash opponents of buses than among bus passengers, whereas on average there are 1.1 road deaths per billion km travelled in crashes with a passenger car as the crash opponent and 1 road death among car occupants. When we look at serious road injuries, it is also much safer for the bus passenger than for the crash opponent. Averaged over the period 1993-2009 the risk of being a serious road injury as a bus passenger per billion km travelled is 2.3 as opposed to 39 serious road injuries per billion km travelled among car occupants. With cars and buses as crash opponents the average number of serious road injuries is 190 per billion km travelled in crashes with a bus as the crash opponent as opposed to 25 with a car as the crash opponent. In this case the difference between buses and cars is reversed: there are more serious road injuries in crashes with a bus as the crash opponent (factor of 7.9) than with a car as the crash opponent (factor of 2.5). In brief: bus crashes are much safer for bus passengers than for crash opponents. This is much less the case for car crashes. Over the years all risk categories have shown a declining trend: bus rides as well as car trips are increasingly getting safer, for occupants as well as for crash opponents. The decline seems to be greater for road deaths than for serious road injuries, but this has not yet been investigated. For travellers, the risk of dying in a road crash is much smaller when they travel a distance by bus than when they travel the same distance by car: averaged over the years 1993-2014 the fatality rates of bus passengers and car occupants differ by a factor of 15. The risk of being seriously injured is also much smaller for bus passengers than for car occupants: a factor 17 averaged over the years 1993-2009. For the crash opponent the risk of a fatal crash with a bus is 7.8 times higher than the average risk of a fatal crash with a car. On average the risk of serious injury in a crash with a bus is 7.9 times higher than the risk of a serious injury in a crash involving a car. There may be a safety effect if bus transport were to result in fewer journeys by car. Part of this effect depends on the occupancy rate of both modes of transport. With an average occupancy rate of 10.3 persons per bus and 1.6 per car (on the basis of the mobility data), for example, it would not make traffic any safer: the net risk of a road death among the crash opponents of car or bus would still increase with a factor of 1.2 if the car occupants would have travelled by bus. As was mentioned above, the outcome of this calculation strongly depends on the occupancy rate. At, for example, an occupancy rate of 30 for the coach, the outcome for a journey by coach will be much more favourable than that for the car rides that are involved. The uncertainty in the value of the occupancy rates is the main uncertain factor in this research. Based on the available international data, the number of road deaths in crashes involving buses and cars has also been compared between the EU countries plus Israel, Norway and Switzerland. As in the Netherlands, the average for these countries shows a downward trend in the number of road deaths during the period 2005-2014. When we look at the number of road deaths in bus crashes as opposed to car crashes in individual countries, the Netherlands take 8th place, more favourable than the average of all countries involved during that period (2005-2014). These international differences in the ratios of bus and car crash casualties are probably caused by differences in the use of buses and cars. Therefore, we cannot make any claims with respect to these findings about differences in risk.
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