Six and a half years of crash records, read as one system.
A road-trauma analysis our principal authored for a government transport authority. Included because it shows the method at population scale: every injury crash in an emirate over six and a half years, analysed against a model that says where prevention can act.
Four parts of one system.
The Safe System model holds that road trauma is produced by roads, speeds, vehicles and road users together, and that a system should be forgiving when one part fails. Every risk factor in the analysis was placed against the part of the system that could change it.
That is the same move as an AcciMap: a finding is only useful at the level with the authority to act on it.
What the engagement was.
At-scene crash reports for every crash in the emirate that produced at least one injury, from 1 January 2013 to 17 June 2019. Unusually detailed for road-crash data: each report records the road users, the vehicles, the road environment and the injuries together, which is what makes a systems reading possible at all.
The raw records were screened, cleaned and verified before anything was read from them. Crash, injury and fatality rates were put on a population and a vehicle-fleet basis so the emirate could be compared with itself over time, with its own regions, and with other countries. Trends were taken monthly and weekly across the whole period. Risk factors were tested for association with injury severity, and the size of each association was reported, not only whether it was significant.
The report identified where the authority could target improvement, organised so that each risk factor sat with the part of the system able to change it, and written to feed policy and regulatory decisions rather than to sit in a file. Delivered as a final report in April 2020.
The authority is not named here, and no finding from the report is reproduced. The analysis and its results belong to the client. What is described on this page is the method and the scale of the engagement.