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Estimating the actual extent of road safety from 1997

The Dutch Ministry of Transport and Public Works wishes to arrive at a new approach for registering data concerning road traffic accidents and casulaties to be able to determine the actual extent of unsafe road traffic conditions. This new approach is being elaborated in more detail by the collaborative efforts of the Netherlands Transport Research Centre, Department for Statistics and Data Management (AVV/BG), Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and the SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research.

Within this context, SWOV was commissioned by AVV/BG to develop and apply a method to assess all hospital admissions of traffic accident victims, so that the actual number of these casualties for the year 1997 could be determined (R-98-51).

 

It can be concluded that the total number of hospital admissions (excluding those who died within 30 days) resulting from road traffic accidents occurring in the Netherlands was 20,190 for 1997.

Besides the numbers of casualties, the numbers of accidents were also estimated with the use of a method especially developed for this purpose. At the same time, casualties and accidents were subdivided according to important characteristics; casualties were categorised according to how they participated in the accident as well as their ages and genders, while the accidents and casulaties both were categorised according to the month, day of the week, period during the day, and the province in which the accident occurred. The margins between the subdivisions are definitely wider than those between the totals.

 

Finally, recommendations were made for the purpose of arriving at even better assessments of the actual extent of unsafe road traffic conditions in the future. The most important possibility indicated for improving the determining of the actual number of hospital admissions was a repetition of the study linking two sources of data.

SWOV Research Activities 11 - March 1999

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