https://goo.gl/4XYEij
A new study out of Georgetown University.....suggest(s) that pedestrian wheelchair users are a third more likely to be killed in a road accident than the general public is. The study, published in BMJ Open, also found that in more than 75 percent of crashes that involve a wheelchair user, no “crash avoidance maneuver” by the driver—like braking or steering—was recorded.
“This gets back to basic city design: How do we design places in ways that make it safe for pedestrians to use them?” says John Kraemer, an epidemiologist and lawyer at Georgetown with a special interest in road safety for vulnerable users, and the study’s lead author. “What we really don’t want is [for] a person who's using a wheelchair or has a disability to choose between not being able to access their community or having to do it in a dangerous way.”
For this study, Kraemer and his colleague Connor Brenton gathered news reports and police records of more than 250 traffic fatalities involving pedestrian wheelchair users between 2006 and 2012 across the U.S. To adjust for incomplete data in those sources, they used a statistical method to estimate a total of 528 fatalities over those years. The data was then compared to general pedestrian fatalities recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.