Brazil's Option to Join iGLAD - International Harmonized In-Depth Accident Data 2017-36-0183

A strong local initiative in Campinas - Brazil is studying how to be more effective in the improvement of road safety in order to align to other worldwide initiatives with similar goals. This paper describes the Brazilian initiative’s approach to the challenge of being aligned with iGLAD (Initiative for the Global Harmonization of Accident Data, starting as a project in 2011 and collecting data since 2007) on the delivery of its first set of accident cases from 2016. The Brazilian source of data started as a pilot project collecting local data with the aim of extending it within the next years to a larger region.

In fact, a consistent method for the development of strategies and measures to prevent accidents and mitigate injury severity comes from accident database analysis. Although databases such as national statistics are available for many countries for assessing accident situations, examining trends, or carrying out similar analysis; the identification of accident and injury causation and the evaluation of countermeasures require a higher level of detail. Comparison with other regions or countries in terms of that analysis has been an aim for many researchers. For this reason, several in-depth accident data collection projects have emerged worldwide in recent years. Unfortunately, comparative analysis of in-depth data from different countries is difficult or even impossible due to different standards for data collection and coding.

For that purpose, Brazil needs to join the methods used in iGLAD, i.e. to process and merge the different data samples describing and overviewing the current status in terms of case counts, marginal distributions as is done by the countries participating from Europe, Asia, Australia and North and South America (currently only Brazil) providing data for iGLAD. As an application example, the iGLAD dataset from 2007 to 2015 was used to analyze the distributions of accident types, presence of safety systems, characteristics of collision deformation and injury severity for each country and to provide country comparisons. The status of Brazil can be assessed in that frame and also capabilities for pre-crash analysis can be assessed. Exemplary statistical assessment of injury probability and descriptive statistics for comparison between different countries were given as a result of the analysis and for the Brazilian sample will give the first trends.

This paper gives an overview of the Brazilian data in the framework of the iGLAD initiative as a new field crash data set and shows its unique opportunities for road accident analysis in a global scope, which are not provided by any other accident data source and will give stronger support for efficient and consistent traffic policies. The analysis according to the harmonized data helps to address challenges of road safety on a global level, whether through the identification of country-specific issues and measures to address them or the harmonization of legislation and ratings.