Overview of Harmonized European Crash Investigations - From Focused Studies to a Holistic Approach

The aim with this paper is to describe the evolution of harmonized European crash investigations. The European Commission has during the past decade funded several specialized crash investigation studies focusing on: the cause of road crashes, child safety, crashes involving trucks and coaches; motorcycle crashes; rollover crashes; roadside infrastructure in run off road crashes; passive safety of passenger cars and fatal crashes. These projects included both methodology development and data collection and the databases comprises hundreds to a couple of thousand crashes each, from a nineteen countries in Europe. Due to the specific objective from study to study and the variation in the investigation methodology it is difficult to combine the existing data in a common analysis. To overcome these limitations and to enable aggregate analysis of in-depth data collected from different countries, a holistic crash investigation methodology was developed within the EU funded project DaCoTA. The holistic crash investigation methodology, further referred to as the Road Crash Information System (RCIS), has defined a common investigation procedure based on the previous studies. RCIS includes two useful tools. One is the on-line manual, publicly available on the internet, that in detail describes the procedures and the data variables collected. The other one is the web based open source application that, in a secure way, can be used to store, analyse and exchange data from different teams across Europe and further afield.