The objectives of the EU-funded project TRACE (TRaffic Accident Causationin Europe, 2006-2008) are the up-dating of the etiology of road accidentsand the assessment of the safety benefits of promising technology-based solutions. The analyses are based on available, reliable and accessible existing databases (access to which has been greatly facilitated by a number of partners highly experienced in safety analysis, coming from 8 differentcountries and having access to different kinds of databases, in-depth or regional or national statistics in their own country). Apart from considerable improvements in the methodologies applicable to accident research in the field of human factors, statistics and epidemiology, allowing a betterunderstanding of the crash generating issues, the TRACE project quantified the expected safety benefits for existing and future safety applications. As for existing safety functions or safety packages, the main striking results show that any increment of a passive or active safety function selected in this project produces additional safety benefits. In general, the safety gains are even higher for higher injury severity levels. For example, if all cars were Euro NCAP five stars and fitted with EBA [electronic braking assistance] and ESC [electronic stability control], compared to four stars without ESC and EBA, injury accidents would be reduced by 47%, allinjuries would be mitigated by 68% and severe + fatal injuries by 70%. Asfor future advanced safety functions, TRACE investigated 19 safety systems. The results show that the greatest additional safety gains potential are expected from intelligent speed adaptation systems, automatic crash notification systems, and collision warning and collision avoidance systems. Their expected benefits (expected reduction in the total number of injured persons if the fleet is 100% equipped) are between 6% and 11%. Safety benefits of other systems are more often below 5%. Some systems have a very low expected safety benefit (around or less than 1%). The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0148.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.
Samenvatting