Motorized Vehicle Safety

2021 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Fact Sheet: Speeding-Related Crashes

Katherine L. Chen
Bor-Wen Tsai
Garrett Fortin
Jill F. Cooper
2021

A speeding-related crash is defined as one where a driver is speeding, racing, driving too fast for the conditions, or driving in excess of the posted speed limit. In the United States, in 2019, over one in four (26.3 percent) fatalities involved speeding, a proportion that has remained steady since 2017 following a decline in the prior decade. Speeding reduces a driver’s ability to steer safely around curves or objects, reduces the amount of time a driver has to react to a dangerous situation, and extends safe stopping distances.

Historically, road safety efforts focused on...

2021 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Fact Sheet: Occupant Protection

Katherine L. Chen
Bor-Wen Tsai
Garrett Fortin
Jill F. Cooper
2021

Restraint devices such as seat belts are a key element of motor vehicle occupant protection systems. Each year, NHTSA conducts the National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS) that measures, among many variables, the use of seat belts by occupants age eight and older. The 2019 NOPUS reported that seat belt use was 90.7 percent among front-seat passengers, a slight increase from the 89.6 percent observed in 2018. Additionally, the 2019 survey found that seat belt use increased during both weekday rush hours and non rush hours. Use during weekday rush hours increased from 89.3 percent in...

2021 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Fact Sheet: Emergency Medical Services

Katherine L. Chen
Bor-Wen Tsai
Garrett Fortin
Jill F. Cooper
2021

There are typically many contributing factors in motor vehicle crashes. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) play a critical role post-crash to reduce fatalities and serious injuries. Recent studies show that an effective emergency trauma care system can improve survival from serious injuries by as much as 25 percent and county-level coordinated systems of trauma care can reduce crash fatalities rates as much as 50 percent.

The Haddon Matrix (see Figure 1) applies basic principles of public health to motor vehicle-related injuries. The matrix looks at the factors in the pre-crash, crash...

NEW! SWITRS Statewide Summary Tool on TIMS

September 20, 2021
Submitted by Lisa Peterson

UC Berkeley SafeTREC’s Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS)(link is external) has been developed to provide quick, easy and free access to California crash data from the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS)(link is external) that has been geo-coded to make it easy for users to query, map, and download collision data.

As part of an ongoing effort to support local and state agencies efforts to improve traffic safety, a new tool is now available, the...

Course Announcement: Fall 2021 Public Health Injury Prevention and Control

July 19, 2021
Submitted by Lisa Peterson
Photo collage from the course flyer showing first responders with stretcher at a motor vehicle crash, a firearm with bullets and a crashed bike with helmet in a crosswalk ...

New Research Highlight: Selected Research on Road Diets

May 5, 2021
Submitted by Lisa Peterson
Research highlights how road diets have been shown to reduce traffic injury

SafeTREC's graduate student researcher Elijah Wade and research analyst Bor-Wen Tsai have co-authored a new research highlight, "Selected Research on Road Diets."

Abstract Pedestrian and bicyclist injury and mortality is a common occurrence in California. Data from the Transportation Injury Mapping System found that serious injuries among bicyclists and pedestrians increased between 2017-2019, with 3,174 recorded in 2017 and a peak of 3,495 serious injuries in 2019. Along with serious injuries, there has also...

New Research Highlight: Commercial vehicles, fatigue, parking, and safety

August 30, 2020
SUBMITTED BY LISA PETERSON

UC Berkeley SafeTREC is excited to share a new research highlight by research analyst Katherine Gosselin, "Commercial vehicles, fatigue, parking, and safety."

New research highlight focuses on the public health and road safety hazards of commercial driver operator fatigue and not having access to truck parking

For commercial drivers, operator fatigue and parking in undesignated areas can result in dangerous collisions. Exacerbating this issue is a lack of freight truck parking, making it difficult for truck operators to find a safe spot when in need of rest. For bicyclists and...

Commercial vehicles, fatigue, parking and safety

Gosselin, Katherine
2020
For commercial drivers, operator fatigue and parking in undesignated areas can result in dangerous collisions. Exacerbating this issue is a lack of freight truck parking, making it difficult for truck operators to find a safe spot when in need of rest. For bicyclists and pedestrians, loading and unloading commercial vehicles in downtowns also present hazards. Increasing the availability of legal truck parking could improve safety for all road users.

2020 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Facts: Emergency Medical Services

Chen, Katherine L.
Tsai, Bor-Wen
Fortin, Garrett
Cooper, Jill F.
2020
There are typically many contributing factors in motor vehicle crashes. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) play a critical role post-crash to reduce fatalities and serious injuries. Recent studies show that an effective emergency trauma care system can improve survival from serious injuries by as much as 25 percent and county-level coordinated systems of trauma care can reduce crash fatalities rates as much as 50 percent.

2020 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Facts: Alcohol-Involved Driving

Chen, Katherine L.
Tsai, Bor-Wen
Fortin, Garrett
Cooper, Jill F.
2020

While alcohol-impaired driving fatalities have fallen significantly in the last three decades, NHTSA reports that alcohol-impaired driving still comprises a large percentage of traffic injuries and fatalities. On average in 2018, one person died from an alcohol impaired driving crash every 50 minutes. There was a decrease in the number of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities and rate per 100 million VMT in the United States between 2017 and 2018. Analyses from SWITRS presented in this program area refer to alcohol involvement and include fatalities and serious injuries where law enforcement...