Crash Databases in Australasia, the European Union, and the United States: Review and Prospects for Improvement

Since the quality of decision making in road safety is dependent on the quality of the data on which decisions are based, efforts to improve the quality, timeliness and accuracy of crash databases are crucial. To contribute to the scientific debate for the identification of directions for improvement of the existing databases, a critical review of Australasian, EU, and US crash databases has been performed and future directions have been identified. Major issues are related to access procedures to crash data, crash report form, severity of crashes reported in the databases, crash location, crash classification, and crash severity. Access to crash databases might be provided to approved road safety professionals through a web-based portal, providing also the detailed police crash reports. The use of electronic crash report forms is strongly recommended since it might solve most of the problems associated with paper. Severity of crashes reported in the databases vary across the countries and not all the countries report property damage only crashes. However, both PDO and injury crashes might give information on crashes to be prevented and we recommend consistency between the countries in collecting also property damage only crashes and using these crashes to develop safety strategies. Combined use of GPS devices and GIS improves crash location and overcomes the traditional problems in crash location, such as inaccuracies and collection mistakes. To develop effective countermeasures, we recommend to classify crashes by the maneuvers and sequence of events of each traffic unit. The adoption of the same system for crash severity classification in different countries would allow comparisons in the safety performances between countries and jurisdictions.