‘Fatigue-related traffic accidents’ refers to a crash caused by drivers’ falling asleep during driving. Unlike drunk driving or overspeed, driver fatigue is affected by many factors. To identify the contributory factors affecting the occurrence of fatigue-related accidents, a case-control study was conducted. The traffic data used in the study was obtained from Heilongjiang Provincial Department of Public Security Traffic Administrative Bureau Data System. Accidents (N=58131) occurring during the 3-year period 2006/2008 were researched, and the data of fatigue-related accidents was extracted. Potential risk factors such as human, environment and road were examined using stepwise logistic regression method. Drivers’ age and gender, driving year, road pavement type and alignment, terrain, time of the accident and streetlight condition are significant factors impacting the occurrence of fatigue-related accidents. Besides, frontal impact, rear-end collision and bump fixation matter are the most common accident types in all of fatigue-related accidents. Identifying the high risk factors of fatigue-related accidents helps reduce driver fatigue and make available control measures.

The bus drivers have to suffer from very high labor intensity every day. Driving fatigue among the bus drivers is very common and has very dangerous risk for traffic safety. Fourteen male bus drivers, divided into two groups according to two kinds of work schedules, participated in a control experiment. The driving session was performed in the real road scene. Each driver was asked to finish a five-laps driving task. The Stanford Sleepiness Scale score was recorded to measure the subjective fatigue feelings of the bus drivers. Choice reaction time and PECLOS indicators were used to assess the driving performance. One-way ANOVA was used to examine significance of data variations with SPSS. Person’s correlation coefficient was employed to explore the correlations among the three indicators. The results reveal that driving duration has a significant effect on the vigilance level of the bus drivers. There are evident positive correlations between the three indicators. And the two kinds of work schedules have different effect on the bus drivers’ prevention of driving fatigue.

The progress of vehicle collision can be broken into three stages: pre-collision, collision and post-collision. Although the direct collision lasts very little time, it is one of the most important stages of the whole process. On the basis of Momentum Conservation, Energy Conservation and improved Coefficient of Elastic Recovery, using Newtonian Mechanics, the paper constructs dynamics model for vehicles’ two-dimensional collisions, which can be used to calculate the velocities at the moments of before and after the collision. The paper uses the Software of PC-Crash as a comparative study, the results of which show that the proposed models are suitable for the analysis of collisions involving only two cars without second collision.

Abstract. Traffic accidents caused by drivers' fatigue carry less than one percent of the whole accidents in HLJ Province during the years 2006 to 2008. However, more than forty percent of such accidents accompanied fatalities. Drivers' fatigue is usually hard to be identified and there are no valid measures that could make real-time detection for it. Accordingly, variables such as drivers' characteristics, time of accident and whether using seat belt are considered to have close association with the injury severity in fatigue-related traffic accidents. This research focuses on analyzing injury severities of traffic accidents caused by drivers' fatigue, utilizing stepwise logistic regression method. Potential risk factors such as human, environment, road, and so on, were examined. Driving year, road pavement type, road grade and alignment, terrain, time and type of the accident, streetlight condition, vehicle type, speed limit, the number of vehicles involved, and whether using seat belt are significant factors impacting the injury severity. Identifying the high risk factors influencing the injury severity of fatigue-related accidents helps prevent the occurrence of drivers' fatigue and improve road safety conditions.

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