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Taking evasive actions vis-à-vis critical traffic situations impending to motor vehicle crashes endows drivers an opportunity to avoid the crash occurrence or at least diminish its severity. This study explores the drivers, vehicles, and environments' characteristics associated with crash avoidance maneuvers (i.e., evasive actions or no evasive actions). Rear-end collisions, head-on collisions, and angle collisions are analyzed separately using decision trees and the significance of the variables on the binary response variable (evasive actions or no evasive actions) is determined. Moreover, the random forests method is employed to rank the importance of the drivers/vehicles/environments characteristics on crash avoidance maneuvers. According to the exploratory analyses' results, drivers' visibility obstruction, drivers' physical impairment, drivers' distraction are associated with crash avoidance maneuvers in all three types of accidents. Moreover, speed limit is associated with rear-end collisions' avoidance maneuvers and vehicle type is correlated with head-on collisions and angle collisions' avoidance maneuvers. It is recommended that future research investigates further the explored trends (e.g., physically impaired drivers, visibility obstruction) using driving simulators which may help in legislative initiatives and in-vehicle technology recommendations.

The aim of many occupational safety interventions is to reduce the incidence of injury. However, when measuring intervention effectiveness within a period, population-based accident count data typically contain a large proportion of zero observations (no injury). This situation is compounded where injuries are categorized in a binary manner according to an outcome of interest. The distribution thus comprises a point mass at zero mixed with a non-degenerate parametric component, such as the bivariate Poisson. In this paper, a bivariate zero-inflated Poisson (BZIP) regression model is proposed to evaluate a participatory ergonomics team intervention conducted within the cleaning services department of a public teaching hospital. The findings highlight that the BZIP distribution provided a satisfactory fit to the data, and that the intervention was associated with a significant reduction in overall injury incidence and the mean number of musculoskeletal (MLTI) injuries, while the decline in injuries of a non-musculoskeletal (NMLTI) nature was marginal. In general, the method can be applied to assess the effectiveness of intervention trials on other populations at high risk of occupational injury.

Head injury is the most common cause of morbidity and mortality in motor vehicle crashes. Efforts to improve vehicle design, which minimize forces exerted to the occupant's head, may lead to a reduction in the frequency and severity of head injury. We therefore set out to identify mechanisms producing severe head injury in motor vehicle crashes (MVC) derived from the crash injury research and engineering network (CIREN) database. CIREN combines crash site analysis, vehicle damage assessment, and occupant kinematics in relation to the occupant's injuries. From the Seattle CIREN database of 101 cases, compiled from 1997 to 1998, we selected those crashes in which the occupant sustained severe head injury (abbreviated injury score, AIS>or=4) for analysis. We examined crash mechanism, energy transfer, point of head contact, vehicle intrusion and resulting injuries. There were 15 cases with severe head injury. These were primarily due to side impacts (n=10) in comparison to front impacts (n=5). The average net change in velocity (delta velocity, DV) was 15 mile/h (range 4-29 mile/h). In cases where the primary point of head contact could be elucidated the B-pillar predominated (4 cases, 33.3%) followed by the striking external object (2 cases, 16.7%), A- (1 case, 8.3%) and C- (1 case, 8.3%) pillars, roof side rail (1 case, 8.3%), windshield header (1 case, 8.3%), windowsill (1 case, 8.3%) and airbag (1 case, 8.3%). In this series the predominant mechanism of head injury was lateral impacts, especially those in which the victims' heads struck the B-pillar. The need for improved head protection from lateral impacts is indicated.