The Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) project, Accident Costs for Project Planning and Evaluation has been completed and the reports are progressively being published. This paper outlines the project from inception to completion, touches on the methodology and the rationale and discusses some of the findings and results. The costs that have been derived are costs per accidents for a range of 19 accident-type groups and represent the cost of accidents reported to the police. Reported accident data forms the basis of the information used by practitioners for a range of applications. There were four areas in which costs had to be determined. The first was the costs per person related to the five casualty classes that appear on the report form (killed through to not injured). The costs per person were based on lost productivity, medical costs, hospital costs, ambulance, time lost at the scene, and pain and suffering. The second was to determine the casualty outcomes of the 19 accident type groups in urban and rural areas and hence the person costs for each of them. The third was the vehicle repairs costs, agian for each of the 19 accident-types. There were determined by an extensive survey of individual motor insurance claim forms. The fourth was the cost associated with the accident per se, such as delay to other traffic, accident recording by police, attendance of emergency services, legal cost, and value of alternative transport. These costs items are combined to generate the standardised cost for each of the accident-type groups. The costs for the five casualty classes had not previously been estimated in Australia and their absence inhibited the application of previous road accident cost data. The detailed look at the insurance claims is also believed to be the first published report that tackles the topic in such detail. (A) For the covering entry of this conference, see IRRD abstract number 849214.
Samenvatting