Designing road vehicles for pedestrian protection

doi:10.1136/bmj.324.7346.1145

BMJ 2002;324:1145-1148 ( 11 May )

Education and debate

Designing road vehicles for pedestrian protection

J R Crandall, director, K S Bhalla, research associate, N J Madeley, orthopaedic research fellow.

Center for Applied Biomechanics, University of Virginia, 1011 Linden Avenue, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902 USA

Correspondence to: J R Crandall jrc2h@virginia.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Collisions between pedestrians and road vehicles present a major challenge for public health, trauma medicine, and trafficsafety professionals. More than a third of the 1.2 million peoplekilled and the 10 million injured annually in road traffic crashesworldwide are pedestrians.¹ Compared with injured vehicle occupants,pedestrians sustain more multisystem injuries, with concomitantlyhigher injury severity scores and mortality.² Although a disproportionatelylarge number of these crashes occur in developing and transitionalcountries, pedestrian casualties also represent a huge societalcost in industrialised nations. In Britain pedestrian injuriesare more than twice as likely to be fatal as injuries to vehicleoccupants³ and result in an average cost to society of £57400, nearly twice that of injuries to vehicle occupants.⁴
Table Removed (Available Only in the Full Text)

Despite the size of the pedestrian injury problem, research to reduce traffic related injuries has concentrated almost exclusivelyon increasing the survival rates for vehicle occupants. Most attemptsmade to . . . [Full text of this article]

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