Abstract
The casualty risk of drivers of having a road accident according to their exposure is usually defined by taking into account the frequency of use of the road infrastructure by these drivers. However, this information does not classify drivers according to their characteristics (age, sex, etc.), and does not enable effective measures for each driver profile to be adopted.
The objective of this project was to define a methodology to know the risk of having a fatal accident of a particular user driver group (professional drivers, car drivers, motorcyclists, etc.) according to their exposure to this risk, and according to different driver profiles within each group. An index was also defined, which can indicate this risk. In this study the methodology was applied to motorcyclist road accidents in Spain in 2007. Motorcyclists were classified into different profiles, considering not only the drivers’ characteristics, but also the type of motorbike they drove. This classification made it possible to discover which groups are more exposed to the risk of having a fatal accident, enabling prevention measures focused on these kinds of drivers to be adopted.
To perform this study a database was created by merging an existing database which contained information about the victims and the motorbike they drove with another database which contained information about the mileage for each kind of motorbike. Following this, the Index of Risk according to Exposure (IREx) for each profile was calculated.
The innovative aspects of this methodology are basically two: IREx assesses the risk by taking into account the mileage of the vehicle, and this assessment is performed separately for each profile of driver and type of motorcycle. The results of the study make it possible to observe some tendencies from which it is possible to draw conclusions which can be helpful in adopting measures to diminish the number of motorcyclist fatalities.
Keywords: IREx, risk, exposure, motorcyclists, safety