Pedestrians and Their Survivability at Different Impact Speeds

The United Kingdom's (UK’s) On The Spot (OTS) accident data collection project started in 2000 and continues to investigate 500 crashes per year. Investigations are undertaken minutes after the collision has occurred to gather all the perishable information. At the time of writing over 3,000 crashes involving all road users and all injury severities have been examined. The OTS database provides a unique insight into the prevailing factors that have been seen to cause crashes and the associated human injuries and vehicle and infrastructure damage that have been witnessed by the crash investigation teams. The research objective of this paper is to outline the pre and post-crash circumstances of 108 pedestrian crashes. The nature of the events that led to the collision, including the respective travelling speeds, time and distance from the moment the impact was inevitable are described. The information provided can be used to begin to outline the potential effectiveness of future crash mitigation systems. Further, the impact speeds are correlated to the injuries the pedestrians suffered with respect to the impact partner. Lower limb and head injuries are highlighted to be the most frequently injured body regions. The risk of injury for pedestrians with respect to the cars’ speed at the point of impact is outlined and comparison made with the literature. The small sample size is a limitation to the work, which has not at this stage been proven to be representative of the UK pedestrian accident population. Further, the nature of real world crash investigation means that some of the calculated speed values have reasonably large ranges. However, the work does offer an up to date review of the risk and type of injury versus impact speed for modern vehicles. In addition, the study starts to describe the in-depth pre-crash circumstances witnessed in real life crashes.