Car crash injuries by seating position and miles travelled

Abstract

This paper studies risk connected with various seating positions in cars. An attempt is made to measure risk relative to exposure, expressed miles performed by passenger cars, including station wagons, and in some instances taxis; two and three-wheeled vehicles, and all commercial vehicles are excluded. study area is Metropolitan Brisbane (Queensland) population 621, 550, and year 1961. types of risk studied include: (a) risk of accident involvement while various seating positions are occupied; (b) risk of being killed, or injured, while occupying various seating positions (here term casualty will be used to combine terms fatality and the occurrence of injury). In case (a), vehicle, or its driver is statistical unit; in (b), it is driver and/or passenger combined in term vehicle occupant, or simply occupant. Other terms that follow necessarily are driver-mile, vehicle-mile, passenger-mile, and occupant-mile of performance, and accident-rate, involvement-rate, fatality-rate, injury-rate and two combined as casualty- rate. third potential type of risk is that of an accident, or a type of accident occurring at various levels of occupancy; it will be discussed only tangentially. This report concerns only part of a larger study, a combination of two projects started by Australian Road Research Board in 1963. One is Queensland Survey into Motor Vehicle Performance, and other is The Brisbane Study of Police Reports of Road Accidents. Papers published so far have dealt with methodological aspects of design, and lessons drawn from survey to help future designs, as well as accident involvement rates per 108 miles travelled relative to type of vehicle, metropolitan, provincial urban, or rural use of vehicle, place of garaging, and sex, and age of driver.