Abstract:

The risk of accidental death per hour spent using the roads in Hong Kong is about 11 times the average risk per hour in the rest of everyday life. Other kinds of travel also have risks. Changes in travel patterns affect the numbers of people killed and injured in transport accidents. This means that all policies that affect travel patterns also affect the numbers killed and injured in transport accidents, and conversely, changing travel patterns may itself be a way of reducing these numbers. Investigation of these interactions between travel patterns and amount of death and injury in transport accidents can benefit greatly from various kinds of data that are already commonly collected in travel surveys. But the range of such investigations could be extended in useful ways if some additional items of data could be collected in travel surveys. There is also scope for the methods used in travel surveys to be extended in new ways to improve understanding of the occurrence of transport accidents and people's involvement in them by supplementing with surveys akin to travel surveys the data that are recorded when accidents occur.