Citation

Niebuhr T, Junge M. Traffic Injury Prev. 2017; 18(5): 537-543.

Affiliation

Volkswagen AG, Konzernforschung K-GERFS/G , Wolfsburg , D-38436 , Germany , e-mail: mirko.junge@volkswagen.de.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/15389588.2016.1264580

PMID

28095033

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: While it is common to regard age-specific groups (e.g. children, adults, elderly), smooth trends conditional on the age are mainly ignored in the literature. The present study examines the pedestrian injury risk in full-frontal pedestrian to passenger car accidents and incorporates the age -besides the collision speed and the injury severity- as a plug-in parameter.

METHODS: Recent work introduced a model for pedestrian injury risk functions using explicit formulae with easily interpretable model parameters. This model is expanded by the pedestrian's age as another model parameter. Using the German In-Depth Accident Study (GIDAS) to obtain age-specific risk proportions the model parameters are fitted to the raw data and afterward smoothed by broken-line regression.

RESULTS: The approach supplies explicit probabilities for the pedestrian injury risk conditional on the pedestrian age, the collision speed, and the injury severity under investigation. All results yield consistency to each other in the sense that risks for more severe injuries are less probable than those for less severe injuries. As a side product, the approach indicates specific ages at which the risk behavior fundamentally changes. These threshold values can be interpreted as the most robust ages for pedestrians.

CONCLUSIONS: The obtained age-wise risk functions can be aggregated and adapted straightforwardly to any population. The presented approach is formulated in such general terms that in can be directly used for other data sets or additional parameters as e.g. the pedestrian's sex. So far, no other study using age as a plug-in parameter can be found.

Language: en

Keywords

broken-line regression; elderly people; fragility; pedestrian-car-accidents; pedestrians; robustness