A Normal Distribution-Based Methodology for Analysis of Fatal Accidents in Land Hazardous Material Transportation

The deaths of accident occurring in land hazardous material transport (rail and road) is a scale standard for judging accident severity in safety programmes. The f-N curve is a common practice to express the results from past scattered accident data through curve fitting method, which only estimate the overall trend. For this reason, this paper proposed a simple methodology by combination of normal distribution and f-N curve. To verify the method, the following three sets of statistical data were selected and analysed in this study: 1932 accidents in over 95 countries (1931–2004) and 322 accidents in China (2000–2008) available in the literature, and 2046 accidents investigated in China (2013–2017). It was found that the mean value curve is almost identical or even better than the best-fitted curve, while the predicted upper and lower limits with 96% reliability (±2σ) covering nearly all the statistical data are beyond the scope of common curve fitting. The result explains the inherent relation between accumulated frequency and deaths in different transport mode, in different country and at different period. This study also provides insights on the evolution of accident severity with the development of social economy and the requirement of safety.