Accident causation and pre-accidental driving situations. Part 2. In-depth accident causation analysis

WP2 of the European Project TRACE is concerned with “Types of Situations” to analyse the causation of road traffic accidents from the pre-accidental driving situation point of view. Four complementary situations were defined: stabilized situations, intersection, specific manoeuvre and degradation scenario. To reach this objective, the analysis is based on a common methodology composed on 3 steps: the “descriptive analysis” which from general statistics will allow to identify among the studied situations those them relevant and to give their characteristics, the “in-depth analysis” allowing to obtain accident causes from the generic description of the problems identified in the previous step and the risk analysis identifying the risk of being involved in an accident taking into account the results obtained from the ‘in–depth’ level. This report is dedicated to the identification of the accident causes analysed for the pre-accidental driving situation point of view, i.e. the circumstances in which the driver is involved just prior the accident. This analysis has been conducted from the scenarios identified for each type of situation during the descriptive analysis realized in a first part (Report D2.1: Accident causation and pre-accidental driving situations. Part 1. Overview and general statistics). These results are based on the study of disaggregated data (in-depth accidents collection databases) available via WP8 in TRACE. With the identification of the main causes and contributing factor, the aspect related to the human functional failure has been taken into account. This innovative concept studied in TRACE WP5, has been used here in order to have a more complete overview of the problems in working on each road users involved in the accident and not only on the whole accident.