Factors related to severe single-vehicle tree crashes: In-depth crash study

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248171
• Publication Date: 2022-01-28T18:24:46Z
• Authors: Kateřina Bucsuházy; Robert Zůvala; Veronika Valentová; Jiří Ambros
• Keywords: Adult; Aged, 80 and over; Male; Adolescent; Databases, Factual; Science; Q; 05 social sciences; R; Accidents, Traffic; Middle Aged; Severity of Illness Index; Trees; Young Adult; Logistic Models; Risk Factors; 0502 economics and business; Linear Models; Medicine; Humans; Wounds and Injuries; Female; Research Article; Aged; Czech Republic

Vehicle-tree collisions are the most common type of road crash with fixed obstacle in Czech Republic. Based on the literature review and using real world in-depth crash data, this paper aims to define factors, which significantly influence the injury severity of single vehicle-tree crashes. In-depth data provide a comprehensive view to the failure on the system infrastructure—human—vehicle related to crash, the in-depth crash database include very detailed information related to infrastructure, vehicle, human failure and crash participants characteristics and their medical condition and also crash reconstruction. Multinomial logistic regression and generalized linear mixed model were used to determine the individual effect of each predictor. The statistically significant variables were the day period, trunk diameter and impact speed. Using multinomial logistic regression shows also vehicle age as statistically significant. Obtained results can help to efficiently direct countermeasures not only on the road infrastructure—e.g. speed reduction in selected locations with specified tree character. However, the emphasis should be also focused on driver behaviour.