Quantifying the upper levels of Hydén's traffic safety pyramid using global data
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55329/vwkr5360Keywords:
crash severity, Heinrich's triangle, Hydén's pyramidAbstract
Hydén's pyramid qualitatively displays the number of conflicts and road user crashes in different severities. Fatal crashes are on the top of the pyramid, undisturbed passages mark the base of it. To quantify the pyramid, open data from the German Accident Atlas and closed data from the Berlin Police have been analysed with respect to time of the week, crash severity, and conflict-type. The data display distinctive weekly patterns that may reflect the traffic state at the hour of the week. Analysing the ratio among these levels for different crash severity levels seems to demonstrate that serious crashes and fatal crashes sometimes follow a different pattern than property-damage-only crashes, or crashes with lightly injured people. A similar result holds true for the conflict-types. This may indicate that their genesis is a mixed bag: sometimes, the mechanisms are different, and sometimes, they are not.
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Author Biographies
Marek Junghans, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
Dr. Marek Junghans is a research associate at German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Transportation Systems. He received his Ph.D. from Dresden University of Technology in Intelligent Transportation Systems. His research interests cover stochastic signal processing and traffic safety with a strong focus on cycling safety, measuring and understanding traffic behaviour to improve safety.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing—review & editing.
Andreas Leich, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
Dr. Andreas Leich is a research associate at German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Transportation Systems. He received his Ph.D. from Dresden University of Technology and worked for several years as a development engineer in the German automotive industry. His research interests cover sensor data processing for traffic safety research.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing—review & editing.
Ronald Nippold, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
M. Sc. Ronald Nippold received his MSc at the Dresden University of Technology. His research interests cover traffic safety and traffic simulation.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing—review & editing.
Peter Wagner, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany | Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Prof. Dr. Peter Wagner is a physicist with DLR, and a honory professor at the Technical University of Berlin. He received his PhD at the University of Kiel.
CRediT contribution: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing—review & editing.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Marek Junghans, Andreas Leich, Ronald Nippold, Peter Wagner
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
