Citation

Asalor JO, Onibere EA, Ovuworie GC. J. Saf. Res. 1994; 25(1): 47-60.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1994, U.S. National Safety Council, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Pure circumstance is the sole cause of the involvement of a vehicle/driver in a multivehicle traffic accident by virtue of the presence of the vehicle/driver in the traffic in the vicinity of the accident, that is, due to exposure. The network conditions under which a vehicle/driver may be involved in a collision due to pure circumstance have been identified to be identical to those under which other vehicles/drivers operate safely in the transportation network. Consequently, the proportion of all traffic accidents in which at least one vehicle/driver is involved due to pure circumstance under different safety conditions is of considerable interest to insurance companies, fleet owners and operators. Also, the proportion of all vehicles that are involved in traffic accidents due to pure circumstance under different safety conditions is of considerable interest to insurance companies, fleet owners and operators, and road traffic safety researchers and organizations. Both proportions are investigated in this study; they were computed using a model of road traffic accidents published elsewhere. The results show that pure circumstance is not negligible in any of the two cases. In particular, they show that the proportion of accidents involving pure circumstance increases significantly as the proportion of multivehicle accidents in the network increases. Results for two-vehicle, three-vehicle, and higher-order-vehicle accidents are also presented. The driver exposure and hazard index from the results compared favorably with previously published empirical results. The implications of the findings are discussed.