Book Description

This report defines a new pre-crash scenario typology for crash avoidance research based on the 2004 General Estimates System (GES) crash database, which consists of pre-crash scenarios depicting vehicle movements and dynamics as well as the critical event immediately prior to a crash. This typology establishes a common vehicle safety research foundation for public and private organizations, which will allow researchers to determine which traffic safety issues should be of first priority to investigate and to develop concomitant crash avoidance systems. Its main objectives are to identify all common pre-crash scenarios of all police-reported crashes involving at least one light vehicle (i.e., passenger car, sports utility vehicle, van, minivan, and light pickup truck); quantify their severity in terms of frequency of occurrence, economic cost, and functional years lost; portray each scenario by crash contributing factors and circumstances in terms of the driving environment, driver, and vehicle; and provide nationally representative crash statistics that can be annually updated using national crash databases such as GES. This new typology includes 37 pre-crash scenarios accounting for approximately 5,942,000 police-reported light-vehicle crashes, an estimated economic cost of 120 billion dollars, and 2,767,000 functional years lost. These statistics do not incorporate data from non-police-reported crashes.