The purpose of this study was to estimate the burden of road traffic injury due to alcohol consumption by someone other than the injured party. We estimated the number and proportion of these traffic deaths and non-fatal traffic injuries, and the associated social costs, for a five-year period (2003-2007) in New Zealand. We found that more than 40% of alcohol-related crash injuries in New Zeala...

Previous work has led to the development of a crash energy management (CEM) system designed to distribute crush throughout unoccupied areas of a passenger train in a collision event. This CEM system is comprised of crush zones at the front and rear ends of passenger railcars. With a consist made up of CEM-equipped cars, the structural crush due to a collision can be distributed along the length...

Models that describe the processes by which drivers follow each other in the traffic stream are generally referred to as car-following models. During the past 50 years, driver behavior within the traffic stream has been studied and models that attempt to describe this behavior have been proposed. Car-following models have frequently been developed for the purpose of incorporation with microscop...

While the number of fatalities on Danish roads has decreased in the last 40 years, research has not investigated the contribution of legislation changes, enforcement measures, technological enhancements, infrastructural improvements and human factors to this reduction. In the context of a Danish car market with remarkably high registration tax that causes potential buyers to hold longer onto ol...

A study was conducted to find out whether in a rear-impact motor vehicle accident, velocity changes in the impact vehicle of between 10 and 15 km/h can cause so-called "whiplash injuries". An assessment of the actual injury mechanism of such whiplash injuries and comparison of vehicle rear-end collisions with amusement park bumper car collisions was also carried out. The study was based on expe...

The approaching deadline for eCall service implementation for new cars in 2018, raises a series of technical and logistic issues. The eCall service, part of iCar initiative, aims to reduce the road fatalities and severity injured person reduction, for post-crash situations. The eCall service consists into an In Vehicle System (IVS), which will be delivered mandatory on new cars, starting with 2...

Vehicular injury is one of the main reasons for traumatic injuries. Finite Element Human Body Models (FEHBM) have become very popular to assess car crashes and the subsequent injuries. It provides the possibility to predict stress and strain values in tissue level by representing anatomical structures in details. An essential requirement for the FEHBM is to exhibit human-life response, i.e. bei...

Overall comparisons of crash rates based on mileage indicate that truck crash rates are lower than car crash rates, but that truck crashes are more severe. In 1978 the overall U.S. crash rate for cars was estimated at 8.2 accidents per million vehicle-miles of travel; for large trucks (including combinations) the rate was 4.7 per million vehicle-miles, and for combination trucks (e.g., tractor-...

Bootstrap and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have received much attention in recent years. We study computer intensive methods that can be used in complex situations where it is not possible to express the likelihood estimates or the posterior analytically. The work is inspired by a set of car crash data from real traffic. We formulate and develop a model for car crash data that aims to estim...