The 'TRIPOD' method has been developed for analysing safety on the industrial shop floor. This paper discusses whether the 'TRIPOD' method can also be used to analyse traffic accidents. This method considers accidents as end results of causal chains of events. The 'TRIPOD' philosophy is that: (1) latent errors are the most fundamental causes of accidents; and (2) a safety strategy should be directed at these causes. This study used 50 accident descriptions. These consisted of the original Dutch Road Accident Registration (VOR) forms, and of the official police reports. The results show that the largest source of traffic accidents are: (I) road design errors; (II) bad traffic measures; and (III) the presence of errors inducing circumstances, for instance errors due to the layout of the road traffic system that insufficiently takes the functioning of older people into account. The results of the study suggest that the application of the 'TRIPOD' method to both police registration forms and official police reports causes a lot of reliability problems. However, the method can be a useful tool to analyse accidents, provided that additional data are collected and the required expertise is obtained via team work.
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