This paper reviews the use of reflectorized number plates in australia as a traffic collision countermeasure. Traffic crash data from the australian capital territory and from tasmania are examined (separately) for the years when they changed from non-reflectorised to reflectorised number plates. Attention is restricted to night-time rear-end and night-time parked vehicle collisions where one vehicle had a reflectorised number plate and the other had a non-reflectorised plate. It had been thought that if reflectorised number plates were acting as a crash countermeasure, there should be a better than 50% chance that in the crashes studied the vehicle struck was fitted with a non-reflectorised number plate. However, it was found from both sets of data that it was just as likely that the vehicle struck was fitted with a reflectorised number plate. Thus, in the crashes studied, reflectorised number plates did not act as an effective crash countermeasure in either the australian capital territory or tasmania. However, there were indications in the tasmanian data that the use of reflectorised number plates had a greater effect on the casualty crashes than on non-casualty crashes.
Samenvatting