What is it about?
Crash researchers are often careless or totally negligent in extrapolating their results on crash causes or other characteristics from one source population to larger and more important ones such as serious crashes. Naturalistic driving researchers are the worst. The idea that Mixed-Safety Critical Event data (hard braking + swerves + lane drifts + whatever) can be extrapolated to important crashes is completely spurious. Mixed-SCEs are not crashes, are not derived from crashes, and are nothing like crashes.
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Why is it important?
Many researchers and public officials believe that they understand crash causation based on naturalistic driving data. That is a false belief. The U.S. DOT Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has spent millions of dollars based on this belief. They believe that Mixed-SCE data can be used to discern the effects of hours-of-driving and other schedule features on truck driver fatigue, and then use this to develop Hours-of-Service rules. This is a total fallacy. All this money and time have been wasted.
Perspectives
I have been involved in Naturalistic Driving since the inception of the idea and performed Mixed-SCE studies when I was a Senior Transportation Fellow with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. That's when I realized that the methodology was bogus. I decided then to perform research to debunk the method if and when I had time to collect and analyze the necessary data. I have now done that.
Ronald Knipling
Safety for the Long Haul Inc.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Crash Heterogeneity: Implications for Naturalistic Driving Studies and for Understanding Crash Risks, Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board, January 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.3141/2663-15.
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