The effect of vehicle weight on driver injury is examined using North Carolina accident data for 1973, 1974 and 1975. The analysis is in two parts. First is a descriptive analysis based on a series of crosstabulations of driver injury by vehicle weight across various subsets of the data (single-vehicle crashes, rural crashes, urban two-car crashes, high speed crashes, etc.). As expected, single-vehicle accidents are found to be more serious than two-vehicle accidents, and rural accidents more serious than urban accidents. Increased car weight was shown to clearly lessen the risk of serious or fatal injury for all accident types combined and for two-vehicle crashes. However, for single-vehicle crashes, a consistent relationship between car weight and driver injury was not found. In order to more closely examine the vehicle weight-driver injury relationships, linear categorical models were constructed for predicting serious (A+K) driver injury as a function of vehicle weight and other related variables. Five such models were developed -- one for single-vehicle crashes, one for belted drivers in two-car crashes, and three for unbelted drivers in two-car crashes (corresponding to three speed categories). The variables incorporated in the models were a basic (assumed) set of control variables based on previous research plus additional variables as suggested by the 1973-75 data. The results of the modeling for the most part follow expectations. Drivers in the lightest weight category cars consistently have the highest predicted injury rates, but the other three weight categories are not always differentiated.


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    Title :

    A Categorical Analysis of the Relationship Between Vehicle Weight and Driver Injury in Automobile Accidents


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    1978


    Size :

    91 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




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