Prevalence and factors associated with pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries: case Finland

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the prevalence of pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries (MAIS3+) in traffic, and to identify differences in the factors associated with the injury severities. The study included all motor vehiclepedestrian accidents in Finland in 2014-2017 and exposure data from the national travel survey of 2016. The results showed a heightened fatality and serious injury rate specifically for pedestrians aged over 75 years and in rural heartland areas. Furthermore, differences were identified in the current speed limit, municipality type, lighting conditions, vehicle type, area type, accident location, and road conditions between pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries. The main implications of the study are that traffic safety measures should be tailored to local conditions and amended and redirected to account for both fatalities and serious injuries. In order to conduct comparative studies between countries and support the achievement of transport policy objectives, further harmonisation of definitions and data collection procedures for traffic accidents is needed.

Exploratory Analysis of Pedestrian Road Trauma in Finland

“…Key at-risk groups identified in the analysis align with Finnish and international research [2,15,27]. The highest number of cases involved pedestrians over the age of 75, in line with previous analysis by Malin, who identified a heightened rate of serious and fatal injuries amongst older adults [15]. The findings of cluster analysis indicate that many cases involving older pedestrians occur at pedestrian crossings in low-speed environments.…”

“…To date, there have been some impressive achievements in terms of pedestrian safety in Finland; for example, in 2019, the city of Helsinki recorded no pedestrian deaths. Notwithstanding, in Finland, like most countries in the OECD, pedestrians are over-represented in injury statistics [15][16][17].…”

“…Recently, Malin et al [15] performed a review of pedestrian trauma reported in police datasets in Finland between 2014 and 2017. Malin et al identified that subgroups of pedestrians including males and older pedestrians aged over 75 years had the highest rates of injury [15].…”

“…Recently, Malin et al [15] performed a review of pedestrian trauma reported in police datasets in Finland between 2014 and 2017. Malin et al identified that subgroups of pedestrians including males and older pedestrians aged over 75 years had the highest rates of injury [15]. Vehicle type, crash location, temperature, and road conditions were also found to be significantly associated with injury severity when considering differences between fatal and serious injuries.…”

Rethinking transport – towards clean and inclusive mobility (Highlights of the 2020 Transport Research Arena conference)

“…The third set of papers focuses on a multidimensional user perspective, providing the distributive analysis of impacts, as well as a range of insights from sociological and psychological angles. Fearnley & Aarhaug assess distributional impacts from subsidising urban and suburban public transport [15], while Malin et al 1 evaluate prevalence and characteristics of pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries in Finland [16]. In the context of users relation to emerging mobility technologies, Ramos et al 1 develop mobility profiles of both users and non-users of car sharing in several European cities [17], while both Matyas 1 and Hoerler et al 1 provide an analysis of user needs, motivational and barrier factors for the use of mobility-as-a-service [18,19].…”