Road accidents with trucks involved account for 5,8% (5,486 accidents) of the total number of traffic accidents registered in the Spanish State Road Network (year 2004), 16% (766) of the total number of fatalities, and 7,6% (1,600) of the total number of seriously injured people. These data reflect the increase of severity when a truck is involved in an accident. This kind of accident is also characterized by specific factors that are not found in other crashes. Firstly, the dynamic performance and aggressivity of trucks are different from those of other vehicles, due to their greater mass and their geometric characteristics and configuration. The load may influence the development of an accident and its severity. Lastly, there is a large number of specific regulations about the conditions that transport operators, drivers and vehicles must accomplish.
All these reasons justify a scientific and integrated study of the factors that may influence truck accidents and their severity. This is the main goal of this project, that can be summarised in:
- To significantly increase the knowledge of the factors related to road accidents with trucks involved, and to analyse the impact of variables that may influence the occurrence of these accidents and their severity.
- To develop methodological tools and models that contribute to the former objective, constitute a set of scientific approaches that may be applied to other fields of road safety, and could be the starting point for a permanent programme for the analysis of truck accidents and the formulation of recommendations to reduce road accidents and casualties.
The influence of variables that are not included in General Databases, and that have not been studied so far, shall be analysed through in-depth accident investigations. These may include: risk situations caused by the interaction between vehicle and infrastructure, load, behaviour of drivers and practices of transport operators regarding vehicle maintenance and transport operations.
The integration of variables that influence the demand of transport (exposure) with others that influence the conditions in which transport is performed (risk) will be conducted through the development of macroeconomic models of the DRAG family, in order to estimate the influence of different variables on accidents and their severity.
Lastly, a model for the estimation of road accident costs will be developed and integrated with the DRAG model. This shall make possible the evaluation of the cost of all road accidents that take place in Spanish roads and the development of cost-benefit analysis tools for policy-making.
