Cost-benefit study concerning car front impact requirements to increase the crash-safety of pedestrians and cyclists

In The Netherlands, the traffic safety of pedestrians and cyclists, has been a major concern for many years. Though both the annual number of pedes- trian casualties and cyclist casualties have decreased during the past 10 to 20 years, as in almost all European countries, Dutch policy aims at further reducing these numbers. The proposed measure, introducing tests regarding the front-end of cars, is strongly supported by the Dutch Ministry of Transport, since it is expected that both pedestrians and cyclists will benefit. In order to establish a stronger (international) base for this purpose, the Dutch Ministry of Transport has agreed to have SWOV carry out a cost benefit study on the subject, of which the general design should be comparable to similar studies, already carried out by TRL (UK) and BASt (Germany), in order to compare results. In this report, the Dutch cost benefit analysis, carried out by SWOV, is described. The scope of the problem is derived from Dutch national accident data. The annual number of casualties, relevant to the problem of collisions with car front-ends, is at least 6500 (pedestrians and cyclists). Nearly 200 of these casualties were killed, while 1900 were hospitalized. It is certain that the remaining number of other injured (slightly injured) is in reality far greater than the 4400 registered casualties, due to the problem of under-registration. In another part of the study, gross costs pertaining to casualties have been calculated. This resulted in a 1991 value of average costs per fatality of about 900,000 guilders (415,000 ECU's); the costs per hospitalized are about 115,200 guilders (53,000 ECU's); costs per slightly injured are 28,800 guilders (13,300 ECU's). Expected effectiveness of the proposed measure has been derived from indepth accident data, following the model used in the BASt-study, mentioned before. Using this effectiveness data, as well as the cost data and the national accident figures, Dutch benefits of the proposed measure have been calculated, their total number being more than 750 casualties spared (of whom 11 fatalities, 263 hospitalized). In 1991 money value, these annual benefits amount to 24,800,000 ECU's. These benefits are the result of the compliance of new cars to the proposed measure. Assuming that each year, some 500,000 new cars, complying to the measure, replace the same number of older cars, the cost per new car may be up to 50 ECU's, in order to keep a positive cost-benefit ratio. In view of extra cost-expectations for new cars, complying to the measure as reported in the TRL-study, mentioned above, this means that a positive ratio of benefits over costs of 3:1 is feasible. It is concluded that implementation of the proposed measure will be of great benefit for The Netherlands