Development of a method for detecting jerks in safety critical events.

A new method for detecting jerks in safety critical events, based on the characteristics of the braking caused by the driver in time critical situations, has been developed and evaluated in a small pilot test and also applied on a naturalistic driving study. A portable event data recorder, capable of measuring and recording acceleration profiles for a predetermined time period before and after the safety critical situation, has also been developed to ensure high data quality used to evaluate the proposed method. Thus, an analysis of the acceleration profile is possible during the entire braking event.

Estimation of the severity of safety critical events.

Today, various measures are used to estimate the severity of a traffic conflict. However, these measures are all limited to estimating the crash risk and do not include any estimates of the possible consequences of a potential crash. In accident analysis the estimated severity of the event is related to the outcome of the crash, such as injury levels.

Jerky driving--An indicator of accident proneness?

This study uses continuously logged driving data from 166 private cars to derive the level of jerks caused by the drivers during everyday driving. The number of critical jerks found in the data is analysed and compared with the self-reported accident involvement of the drivers. The results show that the expected number of accidents for a driver increases with the number of critical jerks caused by the driver.