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Estimating Fatality Reductions from Increased Safety Belt Use
Author(s) -
Evans Leonard
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/j.1539-6924.1987.tb00968.x
Subject(s) - case fatality rate , crash , statistics , poison control , demography , occupational safety and health , environmental health , econometrics , forensic engineering , mathematics , medicine , engineering , computer science , population , pathology , sociology , programming language
Fatality reductions from increases in safety belt use are estimated taking into account that drivers who change from being nonusers to being users have lower accident involvement rates than the remaining nonusers, a process referred to as “selective recruitment.” Analytical functions are derived which express expected fatality reductions in terms of changes in safety belt use rates from an initial rate. The function parameters are determined by requiring that computed average crash rates for nonusers be 53% higher than the rates for users, a recently determined empirical value. These functions show that, depending on the initial use rate and use rate increase, selective recruitment may increase or decrease expected fatality reductions. However, effects are relatively small, in no case exceeding ±5.3%.