The ten most urgent problem situations for children on the way to and from school have been identified by the dutch directorate of traffic safety. The identification of these situations was based on fatal traffic accidents involving children. In order to facilitate the development of infrastructural countermeasures the causes and circumstances of these accidents were studied. This report focuses on the way these situations are identified. The principle of identification of problem situations (from national accident data to specific problem situations) has at least two shortcomings: (a) the number of locations which gave rise to the high number of accidents in the identified problem situation is unknown, (b) the identified problem situations have to be filled in with more (often location specific) information to facilitate the development of adequate infrastructural measures; developing infrastructural measures from accident classification only is virtually impossible. The method of classification on the basis of a description of accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists and moped riders is studied and an alternative classification is proposed.
Samenvatting