Heavy Truck Occupant Protection > Heavy Truck Crash Data

USDOT Crash Data Sources:  

• General Estimates System (GES):  Data in NHTSA’s General Estimates System (GES) database come from a nationally representative sample of police reported motor vehicle crashes of all types, including heavy truck crashes.  Injury data in GES is in the form of police-reported KABCO scores (where K’- Killed or Fatal injury; ‘A’- Incapacitating injury; ‘B’- Non-incapacitating injury; ‘C’- Minor injury; and ‘O’- No injury). 

• Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS):    FMCSA and NHTSA conducted the Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS) to examine the reasons for serious crashes involving large trucks.  From the 120,000 large truck crashes that occurred between April 2001 and December 2003, a nationally representative sample (totaling 963 crashes) was selected for inclusion in LTCCS. The LTCCS is particularly useful for the CenTIR study because the cases in the LTCCS have been investigated with sufficient detail to determine injury sources and mechanisms. 

CenTIR Approach to Analysis of Crash and Injury Data

• The General Estimates System (GES) crash database was examined to determine overall statistics on frequency of crashes producing the most serious injuries (as defined by police-reported KABCO scores).  The number of crash records in the 2001-2003 GES file is sizeable (19,484 truck records un-weighted).  Crash types in GES which showed the highest injury severity were identified.  Results of the GES analysis indicate that heavy trucks are involved in:
  
  
  • Proportionately more roadway departure crashes than the “all other vehicles” population. 
  • Rear-end collisions in a near equal proportion to the remainder of the vehicle population.
  • Significantly fewer intersection type crashes than the “all other vehicles” population.
• These identified crash types were then employed to search the LTCCS database.  This search produced 864 crash records (un-weighted) for the vehicle population of interest. 
• The selected LTCCS data records were mined to extract details on the injuries sustained (and their severity) as well as the injury mechanisms for these crash types. This information is being used in the Task 3 modeling activities, currently in progress.