As lane-departure warnings and blind-spot detection systems become an option for school buses, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published research that claims the technology could have prevented more than 70,000 injuries in passenger vehicle crashes, according to reviews of police reports.
Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research, evaluated different crash-avoidance solutions when studying data from 85,000 police reports of crashes occurring in 2015 and published the results this month. Her research on lane departure warnings purports that the rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities are reduced by 11 percent and the rates of injuries in these crashes are lowered by 21 percent. This equates to a reduction of 55,000 injuries.
Cicchino’s analysis accounted for driver age, gender, insurance risk level and other factors that could affect the rates of crashes per insured vehicle year. But IIHS explained that there weren’t enough fatal crashes to include in a statistical model that controlled for demographics. It said a simpler analysis that didn’t account for driver demographics found that lane departure warning reduced the rate of fatal crashes by 86 percent.
Read the Full Article at School News Transportation
August 30, 2017 Written by Ryan Gray