Acquisition and analysis of road incidents based on vehicle dynamics

Overview & Synopsis

Because motor vehicle crashes have decreased during the last decade in many countries in the world andare more diffuse, local authorities have difficulties to define road safety policies. An experiment with 51cars of public fleets equipped with a specific Event Data Recorder was carried out in France during one year. The purposes of this research were to evaluate if incident data (critical driving situations) help to understand crashes, and to explore a new way for road infrastructure safety diagnosis. The analysis of 339genuine incidents and 1237 simple events recorded illustrates the potentiality of such an experiment and provides: some insights about conditions in which incidents occur, a general overview of their distribution according to different road layouts, as well as information on the different levels of accelerations reached.It can be noticed that there is an over representation of incidents in right curves compared to left curves.The simple events involving mostly the infrastructure could be used to detect road defects. Genuine incidents where the vehicle is subjected to important dynamic demands, related to potentially unsafedriving situations, can be used to improve knowledge of the motor vehicle crashes thanks to incident mechanisms analysis.