Abstract
Nowadays there is no European regulation regarding the safe transportation of children’s trolleys (CT) in public transport vehicles, with some exceptions based on recommendations and codes of good practices, limited to local transport operators and regional administrations. In addition, applied research has not been conducted to evaluate the safety of children when the pram rolls over inside an urban bus.
This paper will show part of the results obtained in a research project conducted by the Institute for Automobile Research (INSIA) of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) jointly with the Institute of Design and Manufacturing (IDF) of the Technical University of Valencia (UPV), in collaboration with the local transportation agencies of Madrid and Valencia, and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICIN), and whose ultimate objective is to establish the technical requirements for assuring the accessibility and safety in the use of CT in public transportation vehicles.
This paper will analyze on a first stage the influence of the pram characteristics and dimensions with regard to their stability inside the vehicle, second, it will be assessed the injury probability for some critical emergency maneuvers.
The methodology applied consisted on the measurement of the geometrical and inertial characteristics of a widely representative sample of the strollers and prams market, jointly with a quasi-static evaluation of their stability. Based on that analysis, some prams had been selected and tested in dynamics situations inside a bus during emergency maneuvers of braking and cornering. The dynamic tests were carried out using an actual urban bus provided by EMT Madrid and consisted in a hard-braking test to simulate an emergency braking, slalom and a circular test path with progressive speed to simulate hard cornering.
As occupant had been considered 9 months percentile in order to evaluate the accelerations levels experimented as consequents of rollovers and interior collisions.
Finally this paper shows the correlations between the quasi-static and dynamic prams rollovers and the accelerations levels and most representative injures criteria for the dummies during dynamic tests, furthermore some design recommendations have been summarized in order to enhance child’s safety.
Keywords: Children trolleys, accessibility, safety, public transportation, transportation vehicles.