title: Analyzing injury severity of bus passengers with different movements.
abstract: Though public transport vehicles are rarely involved in mass casualty accidents, when they are, the number of injuries and fatalities is usually high due to the high passenger capacity. Of the few studies that have been conducted on bus safety, the majority focused on vehicle safety features, road environmental factors, as well as driver characteristics. Nevertheless, few studies have attempted to investigate the underlying risk factors related to bus occupants. This article presents an investigation aimed at identifying the risk factors affecting injury severity of bus passengers with different movements.
  
  
  
  Three different passenger movement types including standing, seated, and boarding/alighting were analyzed individually using classification and regression tree (CART) method based on publicly available accident database of Great Britain.
  
  
  
  According to the results of exploratory analyses, passenger age and vehicle maneuver are associated with passenger injury severity in all 3 types of accidents. Moreover, the variable "skidding and overturning" is associated with injury severity of seated passengers and driver age is correlated with injury severity of standing and boarding/alighting passengers.
  
  
  
  The CART method shows its ability to identify and easily explain the complicated patterns affecting passenger injury severity. Several countermeasures to reduce bus passenger injury severity are recommended.
authors.affiliation: a Highway School, Chang'an University , Xi'an , Shaanxi , China.
authors.forename: Duo
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: a Highway School, Chang'an University , Xi'an , Shaanxi , China.
authors.forename: Yifei
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: a Highway School, Chang'an University , Xi'an , Shaanxi , China.
authors.forename: Qiang
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Bai
authors.affiliation: a Highway School, Chang'an University , Xi'an , Shaanxi , China.
authors.forename: Bei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: b Highway Bureau of Zhejiang Province , Hangzhou , Zhejiang , China.
authors.forename: Hongbiao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ling
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D018986:Motor Vehicles; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012307:Risk Factors; D015599:Trauma Severity Indices; D006113:United Kingdom; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000209:etiology*
keywords: Passenger safety; classification and regression trees; injury severity; public transport