In China, traffic accident data is published annually by the Traffic Management Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security [1]. Accidents without casualties are usually not included. To gain a complete understanding and reliable insight of Shanghai traffic accidents, the project team collected the original accidents records on 192 Shanghai roads between 1-1-2009 and 12-31-2009. The overall traffic accident statistics, the temporal distributions, and the spatial distributions of crashes, crash modes, and crash severity were analysed for different road categories, including freeways, classified highways, urban expressways, and surface roads.

In-depth accident cases were obtained from Shanghai United Road Traffic Safety Scientific Research Center, a research consortium conducting accident investigation in Shanghai. Each case was reconstructed using PC-Crash. The impact speed was estimated and studied for different crash modes.