Investigation of 184 passenger car–pedestrian accidents

Abstract

In China, pedestrians were the most common and the most vulnerable of road users, meaning pedestrians were involved in vehicle-pedestrian accidents more frequently. Little attention has been paid to the investigation of such accidents. One surveying group was built to randomly collect vehicle-pedestrian accidents and analyse these accidents from the vehicle–pedestrian crash characteristics and the relationships between the pedestrian injury outcome and the impact speed. 184 pedestrians were injured and killed in these investigated passenger-car-pedestrian accidents. Among the 184 pedestrians involved in these accidents, 151 were crossing road arbitrarily (82.1%). There were only 17 accidents where the pavement and guardrail satisfied the safety standard. The males were the majority of the casualties (64.7%). Pedestrian injury localisations in head, extremities, chest and torso accounted for 68.5%, 68.5%, 24.5% and 15.8%, respectively. Of the fatalities, 71.4% resulted from brain injury. The injury outcome in elderly pedestrians was more severe and the head severe injury proportion in children was more than that of an adult. Multiple injuries were common in pedestrians. The pedestrian injury outcome was relative to the impact speed, i.e. faster the impact speed, higher was the pedestrian's Injury Severity Score (ISS). There were no fatalities under the impact speed of 30 km/h and there were 4.4% of fatalities at the impact speed of 30∼39 km/h. When the impact speed was above 80 km/h, the pedestrians were severely injured or even killed.

Keywords:

• vehicle–pedestrian
• accident
• impact speed
• pedestrian injury

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development preliminary Plan of China (2007CB516704) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (30800243, 60771025, 30670513).