This document reviews casualty collisions (fatalities and injuries) involving heavy trucks in Canada from 2001 to 2005. Collisions involving heavy trucks include all vehicles in these collisions, such as passenger cars, light trucks and vans, heavy trucks, buses, motorcycles/mopeds and bicycles, as well as all other road users in these collisions including pedestrians. The report presents the heavy truck travel exposure, heavy truck involvement rates in fatal and injury collisions, and the victims in these heavy truck collisions. The report also presents collision characteristics for all heavy truck casualty collisions and separately for single-vehicle heavy truck casualty collisions. Examples of the collision characteristics are the number of vehicles in heavy truck collisions, hour and month of the collision, weather and road surface environmental conditions, road classification, and collision configuration. The collision data in this report were obtained from Transport Canada’s National Collision Database (NCDB). The NCDB comprises data on all police-reported motor vehicle collisions in Canada and is provided annually to Transport Canada by the thirteen provinces and territories. The collisions are those deemed reportable, that is, they occur on public roads and they incur bodily harm and/or property damage exceeding a stipulated dollar threshold, $1,000 for all jurisdictions since 1998. Not all jurisdictions report all data elements in the NCDB. Those that do report all data elements do not necessarily report them each year and those that collect a specific data element do not necessarily use all the codes for the data element. To summarize the report, the heavy truck involvement rate in fatal collisions per 100 million vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) decreased from 2001 to 2005, despite an increase in heavy truck traffic. Straight truck fatal collision rates were higher than tractor-trailer fatal collision rates. For injury collisions, involvement rates for heavy truck collisions combined increased, but decreased for straight truck collisions alone. The raw data show that fatal straight truck collisions increased while tractortrailer fatal collisions decreased, for an overall increase in heavy truck fatal collisions. Injury collisions increased for straight trucks and tractor-trailers. Fatality rates declined in both straight truck and tractor-trailer collisions; however, the raw data showed that fatalities increased in straight truck and tractor-trailer collisions. This increase was due partly to an increase in straight truck occupant fatalities and pedestrians involved in these straight truck collisions. The increase was also due to an increase in fatalities of occupants of the other vehicles involved with tractor-trailers, and pedestrians and bicyclists involved in the tractor-trailer collisions. Note that there was a decrease in pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities in collisions involving all vehicles other than heavy trucks, but the occupant fatalities increased in these other vehicle collisions. Injuries increased for all road users involved in straight truck and tractor-trailer collisions and decreased for all road users involved in collisions that did not include heavy trucks. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting