Comparison of Injury among Several TAD Vehicle Deformation Scales and Definition of a 10 Point Overall Scale. Safety Belt Injury Reduction Related to Crash Severity and Front Seated Position

摘要

In North Carolina and other states, police officers reporting automobile crashes use a pictorial scale to rate degree of vehicle damage. The officers use a booklet containing the TAD scales (Traffic Accident Data).* A given page of the booklet contains a pictorial scale with vehicle photographs depicting three levels of damage to a specific part of the car. Eleven different areas of damage are depicted on the various booklet pages. HSRC, in cooperation with the National Safety Council, has recently completed the process of creating a new pictorial vehicle deformation rating scale. It is the intent of the report to come to grips with the differences from one TAD alpha scale to another in terms of only one variable--the relation of the scale values to injury. By carrying out the necessary adjustments to make the different TAD alpha scales more comparable in their relation to injury, there is a chance to improve TAD scale utility as a control variable.