Analysis of injury severity and vehicle occupancy in truck- and non-truck-involved accidents

The impact that large trucks have on accident severity has long been a concern in the accident analysis literature. One important measure of accident severity is the most severely injured occupant in the vehicle. Such data are routinely collected in state accident data files in the U.S. Among the many risk factors that determine the most severe level of injury sustained by vehicle occupants, the number of occupants in the vehicle is an important factor. These effects can be significant because vehicles with higher occupancies have an increased likelihood of having someone seriously injured. This paper studies the occupancy/injury severity relationship using Washington State accident data. The effects of large trucks, which are shown to have a significant impact on the most severely injured vehicle occupant, are accounted for by separately estimating nested logit models for truck-involved accidents and for non-truck-involved accidents. The estimation results uncover important relationships between various risk factors and occupant injury. In addition, by comparing the accident characteristics between truck-involved accidents and non-truck-involved accidents, the risk factors unique to large trucks are identified along with the relative importance of such factors. The findings of this study demonstrate that nested logit modeling, which is able to take into account vehicle occupancy effects and identify a broad range of factors that influence occupant injury, is a promising methodological approach. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.