Pete Thomas

Loughborough University | Lough

Raising parking charges is a measure that restricts the use of private vehicles. With the introduction of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), the demand for parking has the potential to reduce as CAVs may not park at ‘pay to park’ areas as they are able to “cruise” or return home. However, it might not be financially feasible for them to retu...

Future user acceptance will be a requirement for the AVs to accomplish their estimated safety benefits, highlighting the importance of acceptable driving behaviour. This study aims to investigate the parameters that affect the acceptability of highly automated overtaking. 237 respondents participated in a video based online survey, rating different...

Safety evaluation is a critical aspect through the future stages of automation development. Since there is a lack of historical and generalizable safety data in high levels of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), a possible approach to follow is the microscopic simulation method. Through microsimulation, vehicle trajectories are able to be exp...

External human–machine interfaces (eHMIs) have the potential to benefit AV–pedestrian interactions. The majority of studies investigating eHMIs have used relatively simple traffic environments, i.e., a single pedestrian crossing in front of a single eHMI on a one-lane straight road. While this approach has proved to be efficient in providing an ini...

Growing research attention is focusing on Automated Vehicle (AV) technologies, promising significant safety benefits. An in-depth understanding of human driving will play an important role in determining the most acceptable AV behaviour, supporting passenger comfort and thus the adoption of the technology, but also the optimal prediction of the beh...

This study aims to quantify the safety impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in mixed traffic environments in three calibrated and validated urban road networks including Manchester (UK), Leicester (UK), and Athens (GR). Road safety impacts were investigated through traffic microsimulation techniques combined with application of the Su...

Examining the relationships between the factors associated with the crash development enabled the realisation of driver support systems aiming to proactively avert and control crash causation at various points within the crash sequence. Developing such systems requires new insights in personalised pre-crash driver behaviour with respect to braking...

The assistance and autonomous performance of overtaking manoeuvres can offer significant safety benefits. The impact of driving context on perceived risk emphasises the benefits of using contextual information to adjust the manoeuvring behaviour. This paper follows a mixed approach, addressing two main objectives: identifying factor combinations re...

Introduction: The number of road fatalities have been falling throughout the European Union (EU) over the past 20 years and most Member States have achieved an overall reduction. Research has mainly focused on protecting car occupants, with car occupant fatalities reducing significantly. However, recently there has been a plateauing in fatalities...

Powered two wheeler (PTW) riders are a group of vulnerable road users that are overrepresented compared to other road user groups with regards to crash injury outcomes. The understanding of the dynamics that occur before a crash benefits in providing suitable countermeasures for said crashes. A clearer interpretation of which factors interact to ca...

Investigating crash progression through naturalistic driving studies (NDS) could give valuable insights in crash causation analysis and thus, benefit crash prevention. This study utilises NDS data from the Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP2 NDS data) to look into the whole crash sequence, from a normal driving situation until a crash or a...

The European Road Safety Decision Support System (roadsafety-dss.eu) is an innovative system providing the available evidence on a broad range of road risks and possible countermeasures. This paper describes the scientific basis of the DSS. The structure underlying the DSS consists of (1) a taxonomy identifying risk factors and measures and linking...

The EU research project SafetyCube pays specific attention to serious road injuries, defined as nonfatal road traffic casualties with an injury severity level of MAIS3+. By means of surveys, information was collected on current practices concerning the estimation of the number of MAIS3+ casualties and on costs related to serious road injuries in di...

To determine accurately the number of serious injuries at EU level and to compare serious injury rates between different countries it is essential to use a common definition. In January 2013, the High Level Group on Road Safety established the definition of serious injuries as patients with an injury level of MAIS3+(Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale...

Background: Information about the burden of (non-fatal) road traffic injury is very useful to further improve road safety policy. Previous studies calculated the burden of injury in individual countries. This paper estimates and compares the burden of non-fatal serious road traffic injuries in six EU countries/regions: Austria, Belgium, England, T...

In its 2014 position paper Towards safer roads in Europe. Nine key challenges for road safety research for the next decade, FERSI stated that, despite considerable earlier im-provements in road safety across Europe, the number of road fatalities is no longer de-creasing to the extent necessary to reach national and European targets. In some coun-tr...

Given the recent advancements in autonomous driving functions, one of the main challenges is safe and efficient operation in complex traffic situations such as road junctions. There is a need for comprehensive testing, either in virtual simulation environments or on real-world test tracks. This paper presents a novel data analysis method including...

Objective: Increased numbers of people riding pedal cycles has led to a greater focus on pedal cycle safety. The aim of this paper is to explore factors that are associated with fatal and a small number of serious injury pedal cyclist crashes involving trucks that occurred in London between 2007 and 2011. Methods: Data were collected from police co...

In 2013, 26.090 people were killed in road accidents throughout the EU, approximately 6.200 females and 19.800 males. Females account for 51% of the total EU population, but only 24% of all road fatalities. The objective of this research is the analysis of basic road safety parameters related to road users’ gender in the EU countries, by the use of...

Background In 2013 the London Mayor committed to increasing cycling levels by 400% (from 2001) by 2026. Although the numbers of deaths per year are relatively low cycling in London has become highly politicised with significant media focus on every cycle death in the capital. This study was commissioned by Transport for London to explore contributo...

Background Reliable data on the number of serious road injuries is a prerequisite for monitoring and evaluation purposes. In January 2013, the High Level Group on Road Safety representing all EU Member States established the definition of serious injuries as in-patients with an injury level of MAIS3+ (Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale). Since then i...

Background The European Road Safety Decision Support System (DSS) is one of the key objectives of the European co-funded research project SafetyCube in order to better support evidence-based policy making. The SafetyCube project results will be assembled in the form of a Decision Support System that will present for each suggested road safety measu...

This chapter presents the European Road Safety Knowledge System, which was developed within the Data Collection Transfer and Analysis (DaCoTA) research project of the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission. This knowledge system includes a number of components, concerning data and tools, road safety issues and countries. A three-step meth...

This chapter presents the analysis of a road safety management framework in European countries and the identification of “good practice” for the optimization of road safety management processes, carried out within the DaCoTA research project. It then discusses the road safety management investigation model, and describes the data collection and han...

Car occupants have a high level of mortality in road accidents, since passenger cars are the prevalent mode of transport. In 2013, car occupant fatalities accounted for 45% of all road accident fatalities in the EU. The objective of this research is the analysis of basic road safety parameters related to car occupants in the European countries over...

In the UK and other countries cyclists are the only group of road users with increasing fatalities and cyclist protection has become a high priority both to reduce the risks of cycling and the perception of risks amongst cyclists. The objective of this study is to apply a systems approach to a causation analysis of fatal crashes in order to identif...

Background Cycling is promoted in London to improve health and encourage more sustainable travel. However, the perceived safety of cycling is a major reason given by people not to cycle. Despites people’s concerns about the safety of cycling relatively few cyclists are injured and therefore there is limited information about the factors that contri...

This study set out to evaluate the effectiveness of low speed autonomous emergency braking (AEB) technology in current model passenger vehicles, based on real-world crash experience. The validating vehicle safety through meta-analysis (VVSMA) group comprising a collaboration of government, industry consumer organisations and researchers, pooled dat...

The objective of this research report is to support the development of the forthcoming Cycle Safety Action Plan being prepared by Transport for London to be published in 2014. TfL wished to improve the understanding of the factors which lead to collisions involving fatally injured cyclists and those with life-changing injuries. The research focusse...

L'objectif de cette recherche est de développer et de décrire une méthodologie qui permet de former la structure d'un Observatoire de la sécurité routière européenne (ERSO) qui aborde des questions de e-sécurité en ligne, d'identifier la nature des données qui doivent être inclus dans un tel observatoire, d'une manière qui est facilement interpréta...

The European Road Safety Observatory was established European Commission and first announced in the 2001 Transport White Paper1. It was further developed in the 2003 Road Safety Action Plan 2 where the Commission announced it was to establish a new European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO) to "co-ordinate all Community activities in the fields of roa...

This research applies a recently developed model of accident causation, developed to investigate industrial accidents, to a specially gathered sample of 997 crashes investigated in-depth in 6 countries. Based on the work of Hollnagel the model considers a collision to be a consequence of a breakdown in the interaction between road users, vehicles a...

Crash test based consumer information systems, such as EuroNCAP or US NCAP, have indicated a substantial reduction in the risk of serious injury to car occupants since the mid-1990s. In parallel with these improving experimental results, there has been a steady reduction in the total numbers of car occupants seriously or fatally injured and it has...

When considering how safety systems fulfil drivers' needs, leading to an evaluation of overall benefit, it is important to understand the overall functionality of the system, take into account as many design parameters as possible and consider previous evaluation work. The objective of this research is to provide an inventory of in-vehicle technolo...

The aim of DaCoTA's Work Package 1 is to shed light on road safety policy-making and management processes in Europe and to explore how these can be better supported by data and knowledge. This was done by assessing demands and views of stakeholders as well as by building a good practice model for road safety management investigation. Future version...

This article was published in the journal, Travel Injury Prevention [© Taylor and Francis] The definitive version is available at: http://www.journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/openurl.asp?genre=journal&issn=1538-9588. Previous work examining the effect of vehicle mass has demonstrated the link with occupant injury severity. The principal factor has been r...

This paper summarises the main results of an analysis of accident data conducted for the European Enhanced Vehicles Committee (EEVC) WG13 "Side Impact" to inform the further development of side impact test procedures for cars. The analysis of data from three countries was coordinated by EEVC WG 21 “Accident Studies”. The national datasets of the UK...

Despite considerable improvements in frontal impact crashworthiness, frontal crashes still account for a major number of front seat occupant fatalities in Great Britain. This study attempted to determine the remaining potential for further fatality reduction with passive safety improvements in frontal crashes. No evidence was found to support an in...

A follow-up study of road injury survivors admitted to hospital was conducted in the UK. The outcomes of road injury and their impact on quality of life were assessed using the SF-36v2, EQ-5D and CES-D scales. Lower extremity injury predominated (73%) in the study. Furthermore, there was a substantial impact on physical activity, large injury costs...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the real-world reduction in crash involvement of cars fitted with Electronic Stability Control (ESC) systems. The Great Britain national casualty database, STATS 19, has been enhanced with details of the equipment fitted resulting in a group of 8951 cars with stability control being available for analysis....

This is Restricted Access. The article was published in the journal, International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion [© Taylor and Francis] and is available at: http://www.journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/link.asp?id=112391. In 2001 there were over 40,00 people who were killed on the roads of the 15 member states of the European Union (EU),...

This is an official report prepared for the European Commission. Task 1.1 of Pendant Work Package 1 has a threefold objective: firstly to develop methods and guidelines for the reconstruction of road traffic accidents, secondly to develop a database of information about public domain crash tests, and thirdly to develop methods for determining the c...

This study presents data on light goods vehicle (LGV) crashes. The data are derived from two main sources. The first source involves mass analysis of crashes involving LGVs recorded in the national British STATS19 accident database for 1994 to 2000. The second source involves analysis from an in-depth study of LGV accidents in Britain since the lat...

ABSTRACT This study examined the relationship between EuroNCAP ratings for body region protection and real world injury risk for 653 belted drivers in frontal crashes. It was also able to comment on further improvements in crash protection for post-EuroNCAP cars. Protection for the head and lower leg appeared good. In terms of life threatening inju...

Examining injuries to real people in real crashes is the most meaningful way to validate improvements in crashworthiness as well as to determine where future priorities lie. Examination of U.K national statistics showed that, coincident with the introduction of airbag/pretensioner restraints, there was a significant fall in the rates of killed/seri...