This report describes the final status of the Heavy Vehicle Crash Injury Study (HVCIS), which is comprised of three parts, Police Fatal Accident File coding (Fatals), the Truck Crash Injury Study (TCIS), and the news cuttings database on accidents involving agricultural vehicles. The Fatals part of the project involved the coding of Police fatal accident files for sample vehicle types which included Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs), Light Commercial Vehicles (LCVs), Other Motor Vehicles (OMVs e.g. agricultural vehicles, refuse collectors, fire engines etc.), and Large Passenger Vehicles (LPVs e.g. buses, coaches and minibuses). These files were dated from 1997 – 2002 and were received from a range of Police forces. The TCIS project data was collected by VOSA inspectors under sub-contract, based upon retrospective examinations on HGVs, OMVs, LCVs and LPVs, which were involved in accidents. The TCIS database was populated and managed by TRL using the data supplied by VOSA. Richard Gard Associates provided a database of agricultural vehicle accidents on the roads, under sub-contract to TRL. Where possible, photographs were included in the database. The aim of this exercise was to provide supplementary data on road accidents involving agricultural vehicles of all severities (including damage only accidents). The final release of the HVCIS databases were reviewed against targets set at the start of the project. The distribution of fatality types in the Fatals database was compared with data from STATS19 for accidents involving each of the sample vehicle types to show the representativeness of the data so that findings from analysis of the data can be used to estimate national trends. The Fatals data is generally of high quality and is representative of STATS 19 for HGVs and LCVs but slightly less representative for accidents involving LPVs. This was probably related to the lower number of accidents involving these vehicle types. The TCIS database tends to be biased towards single vehicle accidents and accidents involving multiple large vehicles or cars. Therefore, this data can only be used to draw conclusions relating to the sample and not estimates of national trends. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting