The Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety (PACTS) held a conference on Collision Investigation- how can we learn more on the day that Parliament was attacked. The conference was aimed at deciding if we could investigate accidents in a way similar to air and rail accidents who have their own accident investigation branches.
The conference heard from Steve Barry ACC at Sussex police, and the NPC lead on road death investigation, on the challenges faced by most, if not all, of the UK police forces in regards to the number of officers trained in this skill and their location within larger counties. He also agreed that there was financial pressure to investigate the most serious cases of road collisions but that lower levels of injury etc were not deemed worthy of investigation.
Speakers from both the rail and air accident investigation branches took the audience through their respective roles in investigations. Like Steve Barry they always prioritise what they investigate but, a lot of the reporting is mandatory anyway so they are able to identify where a trend is emerging. Both speakers agreed that having a non-mandatory near miss or potentially problematical reporting system would be difficult in that information could be in any format with no compulsion to report problems to the investigating body.
The audience also heard from other areas where collision investigations are being undertaken. Volvo Trucks have a scheme in Sweden where they attend major incidents involving their products for two reasons, firstly they want to know if all of the system fitted to the trucks actually operated as they were designed to or if further development work was required and secondly they could use the collision to investigate the design of the cab structure to influence future designs. Ian Yarnold from the Department of Transport took us through the work of the RAIDS project (Road Accident In-Depth Studies) which has been in existence since 2012 and which has recently been extended for another research period until 2019. This project is undertaken by TRL (Transport Research Laboratory) and covers an area including Hampshire, Thames Valley, Berkshire and Oxfordshire and investigators attend the scene of serious and fatal collisions to understand the n=mechanics of what has caused the incident in the first place.
Whilst this project concentrates on a very small geographic area of the UK, Highways England and the UK’s County Councils also carry out investigations into whether the road infrastructure had any effect on the incident. They both have their own teams who investigate fatal accidents from a highways perspective and the County Councils also investigate serious/life threatening incident, they then collate their reports, in the case of Highways England this is shared nationally in the form of the annual fatality report.
A representative from Insure the box also gave us some examples of data that their black box device provides in regards to collisions, data that could be useful in accident reconstruction. ITAI Chairman Peter Sippitt took the audience through the role of the collision investigator and the relationship to the coroner as well as giving the audience an insight into how collision investigators work.
Finally Richard Cuerden, Chief Scientist at TRL proposed that it is now time for a Road Collision Investigation Branch, similar to the air, maritime and rail accident investigation branches to bring together all aspects of crash investigation on highways. This appeared to receive acceptance by all conference attendees.