Vehicle Occupant Infrastructure Road User Safety Study – VOIESUR

The establishment of an information system on road safety is achieved by the creation of a database receiving the merging between data from police reports and data from the Rhone registry. This database is used in the context of two independent and parallel tasks : one regarding «the use of police reports« and the other regarding the «recovery methodology and extrapolation« of data. These three tasks feed a 4th task regarding thematic studies. These are designed to improve knowledge of the accident from different categories of road users. Management and business affairs are handled in a transversal way.

- Task 1: establish a database of injured and fatal road accidents for France made from the study of police reports and in coordination with the Rhône registry. This task is the most important in many points: time spent, quality required, input data for other tasks.

- Task 2: addressing the use of a police report with an accidentologic point of view. Inventory of BAAC and PV in terms of completeness, data quality, ... In direct relation with the task 1.

- Task 3: propose a methodology for recovery results and for some of them, extrapolated at a national level. In direct relation with the task 1.

- Task 4: improving our knowledge on specific topics: accident evolutions, accident situation types, explanatory factors balances injuries, accidents involving pedestrians, two wheelers, children and seniors. In direct relation with tasks 1, 2 and 3.

- Task 5: project management process ensuring that tasks are properly carried out (quality and time), coordinated and financially supported. This task takes into account the dissemination and exploitation of results part.

Voiesur project, started in January 2012, has already dealt with many points:

-> Authorization by the CNIL to the CEESAR to be able to develop and manage a database of accidents oriented.

-> Retrieving police reports
The CEESAR in charge of feeding the database of injured and fatal accidents received from TRANS-PV. Integration to the software functionalities of a process for missing pieces exchange of police reports between the CEESAR and police forces to automate the sending and retrieving data.

-> Selection of variables and media creation support
- Organization of variables : distributed according to four categories: General data with the general characteristics of the accident (date, time, location ...); Infrastructure with features or roads where the accident took place; vehicle with the characteristics of vehicle involved; User with general characteristics related to drivers and injured users.
- Implementation and development of the input interface.

-> Police report codification without injuries
- Recruitment of general coders: a job description and hiring coders was initiated by the CEESAR. The job description is precise and restrictive with regard to the selection of persons. It requires serious skills, rigor and reserve (sensitive data).
- Training of general coders made by CEESAR. It must ensure the quality transcription in the database and the level of credibility of the analyzes and studies that follow.
- Implementation and management of a «coding« room.

-> Police report codification with injuries: formalization of the exchange process of medical data between CEESAR and IFSTTAR. It was integrated to the software to automate the sending of data.

-> Consortium agreement signed by all partners.

Realization of 3 project deliverables, knowing that the majority of the deliverables is expected to be completed in 2014: L5.1 - Technical Summary (M6) L1.2 - Presentation of selected variables and coding support ; L5 .4 - Consortium agreement.
Developpment of the input interface / software coding
General coder training and expert coder upgrade
Launch of fatal accident report coding

Because of the huge time asked for the production of the information system or database, with over 9000 police reports studied in detail, the scientific production of the project will come in the 2nd half of the year. They are mainly thematic studies parts of the task 4 and deal with the evolution of the accident, accident type situations, motorized two-wheelers, pedestrians, seniors, children and injury factors.

At the beginning of 2011, road accidents are still in the center of our major concerns. 2010-2020 was declared by the European commission "decade of the road safety“. After a dramatic decrease of the number of people killed on the French roads in the early 2000s, their number decreased more slowly in recent years, even increases during the first two months of this year. Early analysis shows an increase in the percentage of pedestrians and two-wheelers (motorized and no motorized) involved in fatal traffic accidents.

Different systems of collecting information on road safety have already been carried out in the 90s and 2000s to assess road safety during these periods. They particularly focused on fatal accidents. Among these, they deal only with immediately fatal accidents. In this way, they were only an imperfect reflection of the reality of the French road accidents.

For further progress in the field of road safety in order to place France among the safest countries in the world, it is necessary to have complete and accurate information.

In this new project, we propose to perform a new database of road accidents that occurred during the year 2010 and to expand the fields of observation not only to fatal accidents but also to traffic accidents with injuries. Much of this study in terms of workload is dedicated to building the information system by identifying and collecting relevant variables. In practice, the task consists in coding the police reports of crashes with fatalities (FPR) or injuries (IPR) in which the people included in the Rhône register were involved. That means that the database includes the details of the accidents and the full medical records of the people involved in the accidents. This comprehensive database will provide the basis for the correction of the national accident database from the parallel analysis of all the national FPR and 1/20th of the national IPR.

In addition, specific studies will enhance knowledge on certain particularly sensitive categories of road users such as pedestrians, children, 2-wheelers and elderly people. Finally, the project will update the comprehensive information system on road safety that dates from 2000.