Research into factors influencing road crash and injury trends in NSW - tasks 7 & 8: model consolidation and interpretation

This project presents a study of factors influencing trends in road crash frequencies in New South Wales. Trends in casualty crashes have been explored to indicate Compulsory Third Party claim trends and trends in all Police-reported crashes have been examined to indicate trends in motor vehicle insurance claims. The effects of a number of factors on crash and injury trends have been considered explicitly. They included vehicle fleet effects on secondary safety outcomes, road infrastructure expenditure and the effects of soci-economic factors and weather. After considering the effects of these factors independently, a consolidated model was constructed to estimate the relative effects of each of the explicitly considered factors and the proportion of overall crash and injury trends explained by them in combination. Residual trends were then related to road safety program effects whilst the effects of changes in various important crash strata were related to the overall trends in crash and injury observed. Finally, forecasts on crash and injury trends in NSW up to 2009 were considered to describe the likely future burden of overall road trauma in NSW and likely factors contributing to the overall trends.