| Summary: | This thesis is concerned with the quantitative study of certain characteristics of road traffic accidents, with particular. attention being paid to the severity of injury sustained by the victims thereof. The results fall into two main groups: those dealing with the frequency and severity of accidents to particular categories of road user, and those relating to a new theory of injury severity. The following is a list of the questions considered in the first of these groups: factors relating to the severity-of pedestrian injury (with special attention to design of vehicle), factors affecting the survival time of pedestrians killed in road accidents, relation of. model of car to degree of (a) leg, and (b) head injury of its driver, effect of vehicle, age and sex of driver, and locale. on (a) the relative numbers of single- and two-car accidents, and the, proportion of overturning in single-car accidents. Several sections of the thesis are devoted to developing appropriate. statistical: procedures for these analyses. The new theoretical framework for assessing-injury severity that is proposed in the penultimate chapter quantifies the correlation. between the proportion of casualties who are killed and the proportion who are seriously injured. Finally, this theory is used to. explain the positive correlation that is empirically. found to occur between the degrees of injury to the two drivers involved in two-vehicle accidents when only a narrow range of mass ratios. is considered.A table of the major results in this thesis, together with some lines for future research which they suggest, is given on pages 357-363.
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