Oregon state law requires all accidents involving any property damage, personal injury, or death to be reported. From these data the oregon state highway department has compiled motor vehicle traffic accident data, coded on machine cards, in the form of individual detail records containing pertinent information taken from official accident reports. The usefulness of these data was limited because the intersectional accident summaries did not include a measurement of exposure and the summaries were too long to pinpoint high-accident locations closely enough so that corrective measures could be determined. In 1962, a series of ibm 1401 computer programs was developed using the following criteria' /1/ the analysis would be developed using basic data in the available format, /2/ an accident- rate calculation would be included to evaluate accident experience in terms of an exposure factor as well as total number of accidents, /3/ the data must be available for sections sufficiently short to permit pinpointing of hazardous locations in order to locate probable causes of high accident rates with reasonable certainty, and /4/ the tabulation could be used directly by engineering staffs without additional decoding or interpretative analysis.
Samenvatting