A public consultation is in progress by the European Commission. The questionnaire will provide input for the drafting of a strategy to reduce the severity of injuries caused by road traffic accidents. The questionnaire addresses general issues related to road safety and more specific issues on how to improve the data available on victims of accidents and their collection at EU level, and on how to target some specific groups of road users. The European Commission will take stock of all the relevant information on this subject with a view to develop the comprehensive strategy on road traffic injuries. 

A paper titled “Factors Affecting Accident Severity Inside and Outside Urban Areas in Greece” co-authored by A.Theofilatos, D.Graham and G.Yannis is just published in the Journal of Traffic Injury Prevention. From the application of the models, it appears that the factors affecting road accident severity only inside urban areas are young drivers, bicycles, intersections and collision with fixed objects, whereas the factors affecting severity only outside urban areas are weather conditions, head-on and side collisions, demonstrating the particular road users and traffic situations which should be focused for road safety interventions for the two different types of network (inside and outside urban areas).

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Severity of single vehicle accidents’   was presented by Georgios Pispirigkos in July 2011. Lognormal regression models were developed, which allowed the identification of the effect of various parameters (accident type, weather conditions, lighting conditions, etc.) on the number of killed, seriously and slightly injured for each vehicle type separately. Accidents in which two or more vehicles are involved were found more severe and severity was found higher at accidents involving pedestrians and passenger cars. 

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Development of macroscopic models for the severity of road accidents with one or more vehicles’  was presented by Smaragda Kritikou in March 2011. The application of the four of log-rate models revealed the impact of various factors on the accident severity (type of region, intersection, weather and lighting condition, vehicle type, age and collision type). Single-vehicle accidents were found 2.4 times more serious than accidents with two or more vehicles and the severity of accidents for the pedestrians was found 1.2 times higher than that for the drivers and 1.4 than that for the passengers.

A research titled ‘Estimation of fatality and injury risk by means of in-depth fatal accident investigation data’, co-authored by G.Yannis, E.Papadimitriou, E.Dupont and H.Martensen was published in the Journal Traffic Injury Prevention in September 2010. A fatal accident investigation (FAI) database is used, which includes intermediate-level in-depth data for a harmonized representative sample of 1300 fatal accidents in 7 European countries. The results of this research show that the baseline fatality risk of road users involved in fatal accidents decreases with accident size and increases with the vulnerability of the road user. On the contrary, accident size increases non-fatal injury risk of road users involved in fatal accidents.  

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Investigation of the impact of road lighting on the frequency and the severity of road accidents’   was presented by Nikolaos Mitzalis in July 2010.This diploma thesis has been awarded with the Ecocity award 2012. Suitably processed data were used from the database of the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and lognormal regression models were developed. The application of these models led to the investigation of the influence of road lighting and other parameters such as weather conditions, accident type, vehicle type etc. on the number of casualties and injuries. It appears that road lighting contributes to the reduction of the number of accidents and their severity and that this influence increases with the increase of the severity of the accidents. 

A research titled ‘Estimation of the real number of road casualties in Europe’ co-authored by J.Broughton, M.Keigan, G.Yannis, P.Evgenikos, A.Chaziris, E.Papadimitriou, N. Bos, S.Hoeglinger, K.Perez, E.Amoros, P.Hollo and J.Tecl was published in the Journal Safety Science in March 2010. Within this research, the police under-reporting of non-fatal road accident casualties in eight European countries was examined by means of a common methodology applied in each country.  For almost all countries, the actual number of serious casualties according to the new proposed definition was found lower than the number of police-recorded serious casualties.

A paper titled ‘Risk and protection factors in fatal accidents’ co-authored by E.Dupont, H.Martensen, E.Papadimitriou and G.Yannis was published in the Journal Accident Analysis and Prevention in March 2010. Two methodological issues were specifically discussed, namely the accident-size factors (the number of vehicles in the accident and their level of occupancy) and the comparability of the baseline risk. It is argued that – although these two issues are generally at play in accident severity analyses – their effects on, e.g., the estimation of survival probability, are exacerbated if the analysis is limited to fatal accident data.   

A study titled ‘Linking Emergency Medical Department and Road Traffic Police casualty data: a tool in assessing the burden of injuries in less resourced countries’ co-authored by E.Petridou, G.Yannis, A. Terzidis, N. Dessypris, E. Germeni, P.Evgenikos, N.Tselenti, A.Chaziris and I. Skalkidis was published in the Journal Traffic Injury Prevention in February 2009. The study aimed to assess the magnitude of road traffic injuries in a country missing a formal linkage system of police with hospital data, quantify the under-reporting and produce a convenient algorithm exploring its constituent components.