Light Rail Accident Involvement and Severity

Accident causation and accident severity analyses for a light rail transit system are presented, with a view to providing input for the identification and development of accident and severity countermeasures. Accident reports of the Santa Clara County Transit Authority were used in both analyses. In the accident causation analysis, patterns of critical events for various types of light rail accident involvement were determined. The accident severity model is a binary logit model expressing the probability of injury accident as a function of speeds before collision of both the light rail vehicle and the motor vehicle, movement of the motor vehicle before collision, and peak and off-peak period.