Roadside infrastructure for safer European roads: D01 Accident databases for collisions with roadside infrastructure

The purpose of this deliverable was to generate databases and database structures for statistical and detailed data of single vehicle collisions in Europe. Statistical data provides the basis for determining the relevance of single vehicle collisions in Europe. Detailed collision data is necessary to determine the specific performance of roadside infrastructure In the first phase of the project the statistical data from Austria, Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and United Kingdom were collected and the coding strategies were summarised. This work showed that differences in the collecting and analysing of data exist between these countries. Nevertheless, these data were harmonised and a common form was defined to build a representative European database to compare the large amount of data and to identify the distribution of the different accident types and their causes and to provide data and guidance for further investigations. Another objective of the RISER project was the set up of a detailed database for single vehicle accidents which includes data not available from national statistic data. Therefore a database was created based on the STAIRS protocol (“Values and Variables for: the STAIRS project; STAIRS - Work Package 1.ii”). These values and variables were adapted and adapted to the RISER project and a MS-Access database was designed with new data entry forms for the RISER specific data to ensure that all partners can work with the same tools and that the data are comparable. ‘In depth accident analysis’ accident cases were selected from existing databases for an in-depth study to derive the circumstances of roadside accidents and their outcomes. Maintenance repair data were collected to evaluate a potential source of collision statistics and to investigate the influence of data sources on safety analyses. HIASA collected data collected by road operator and has compared this to the data collected for national statistics. The results show that the national data in Spain does not include property-damage-only accidents, only injury accidents. The resulting analysis shows that using a database biased to injury accidents overestimates the severity for some roadside areas and roadside equipment and may underestimate the safety of other roadside features. The use of databases must be carefully reviewed to ensure that a proper safety evaluation is conducted.