Larger vehicles, such as goods vehicles with a gross vehicle weight in excess of 3500kg or passenger vehicles with more than 16 seats, are involved in fewer accidents per billion vehicle kilometers travelled than passenger cars. However, these larger, heavier vehicles are involved in more fatal accidents per billion vehicle kilometers than passenger cars. The UK Department for Transport is currently reviewing its priorities for safety of large goods vehicles and large passenger vehicles. Phase 1 of the review has included an extensive literature search to identify how previous changes in regulation have affected casualty figures and to identify the predicted benefits from more recent research. Phase 2 of the review includes analysis of accident data, including STATS19 (GB national statistics), European CARE database and other UK based studies such as the Heavy Vehicle Crash Injury Study (HVCIS), Co-operative Crash Injury Study (CCIS) and the On-the-Spot (OTS) study. HVCIS is the only UK study that routinely collects nationally sampled accident data specifically relating to larger vehicles and plays a pivotal role in this review.

The project will identify the most cost effective countermeasures for larger vehicles taking predicted casualty reduction, cost of implementation, technical feasibility and likely date of introduction into account. For the first time in the UK, statistical modeling techniques, which are currently used to predict national casualty reductions, are used specifically for the analysis of casualties in accidents involving larger vehicles only.

This paper reports the findings of the analysis, to date, including analysis of the HVCIS fatal accident database which contains over 1800 fatal accident cases involving larger vehicles. Fatalities are comprised of large vehicle occupants and their opponents. The paper features pedestrian impacts as an example of one of the potential key areas of interest that has been identified by this research.