Behavior and Risk Typology: Disaggregation of Accident Statistics and Behavior

Abstract

In road safety research and practice, it is customary to consider accidents in relation to exposure, for example, when accident rates are computed on the basis of number of accidents per head of population, number of registered vehicles or vehicle kilometers. Such measures are typically referred to as accident risk. These measures mean different things and are useful for different purposes. For example, road fatalities per head of population describes the total cost of road traffic to society whereas fatalities per vehicle kilometers describes the safety of a road traffic system for example in comparison to other transport modes. The former typically increases with motorization while the latter improves with motorization (eg. 20). The former emphasizes avoiding death in traffic as such while the latter rather considers deaths as one output in the optimization of the road traffic system. As in the other big public health problems, we should start from looking at deaths per population, or absolute number of people killed in traffic in a country. What matters is how many people are killed or seriously injured in traffic.