Abstract
Keywords
GIDAS, accident research, representative data, in-depth study, accident reconstruction
Abstract - Last year 2.27 million accidents with 474.000 injured and 6.842 killed individuals occurred in Germany (1). Several institutions estimated the annual loss for the German national economy to be approximately 34 billion Euros (year 2001) resulting from these accidents (2). Reviewing statistics of car accidents of the past 40 years this loss is put into perspective. The number of people killed in accidents has decreased to less than a third compared to 1970, for instance. Meanwhile the number of registered vehicles trebled and the average mileage has more than doubled in the same period of time. Several measures in different fields such as legislation (usage of safety belts required at all times, road design), car safety (crash-optimized car body, safety belts, airbags), rescue (better preclinical care and intensive care medicine) had the largest impact on this positive trend. In order to establish such measures detailed and representative data is needed. These profound insights about accidents can be gained by independent and strict scientifically working investigation teams that collect on scene data of the traffic accident. For this purpose, the Federal Road Research Institute (BASt) established a public contract with a team at the medical university of Hanover in 1973.
Over the past years the importance of in-depth studies increased, showing essential results for the optimization of car safety. For that reason the GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study) project was established by the Federal Road Research Institute (BASt) and the German Automotive Industry Research Association (FAT) in 1999. Its target is to annually investigate 2.000 accidents involving injured persons and feed the extracted data into a common database at two university sites. Due to the enlargement of the survey area, statistically representative accident data of two large cities and their surroundings with different infrastructure, geography and topography is gathered. Both teams use the same investigation and evaluation techniques.
In this presentation we would like to focus on the development of the original on-the-spot investigations up to the GIDAS project. The issue of survey methodology and description of the survey area, the random sampling plan, investigation teams, extent and use of the collected GIDAS data will be addressed in particular. At last the layout of the data base, possible use of the data via different data base formats and the modern way of data exchange will be shown. In addition a reconstruction of the event of an accident will be presented exemplarily.