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James Fell served as the Contracting Officer's Representative for the study. AbstractFollowing the same general principles of its two predecessors in 1973 and 1986, the 1996 National Roadside Survey of weekend, nighttime drivers in the 48 contiguous states consisted of interviewing and breath testing over 6000 noncommercial four-wheel vehicle operators between September and November, 1996. Results indicated that the total number of drinking drivers fell by about one-third between 1986 and 1996; however, there was no significant change in the number of drivers at BACs (blood alcohol concentrations) at or above 0.05. Thus, the decrease results from fewer drivers with BACs of .05 or below. Compared to 1973, the proportion of women drivers on the roads during weekend nights has increased significantly. Moreover, relative to males, the proportion of female drivers who have been drinking has increased over the last decade. The number of drivers under the age of 21 with a BAC at or above 0.10 decreased significantly from 1986 to 1996.17.

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This study greatly improves on available information about the risk of injury for drug and multiple-substance abusers. Medically identified substance abusers, especially adult women, have a higher probability of injury, more hospitalized injuries, and more injury episodes per person injured than nonabusers. More aggressive identification and subsequent treatment of female substance abusers appear warranted.

This article describes the multistage sampling system employed in the 1996 national roadside survey and compares it to the sampling methods employed in the two prior surveys in 1973 and 1986. Also described are the data collection procedures at the selected sites, the breath-test devices used to collect blood alcohol concentration (BAC) data, and the methods used to impute BAC values where breath-test measures were not obtained. Overall, almost twice as many (6,298 in 1996 compared to 3,698 in 1973 and 3,043 in 1986) drivers were interviewed in the most recent national survey as in the previous efforts. The procedures implemented in the three surveys are sufficiently similar to permit comparison of these surveys conducted at 10-year intervals.

This paper presents a method for identifying injury episodes using a medical claims database. The analysis suggests that follow-up to check for minor long-term sequelae of brain injury is rare.

When a truck and an automobile are involved in a crash, the harm to occupants tends to vary with the weight of the vehicles involved. In determining the appropriate level of government expenditures for traffic safety, costs in multivehicle crashes involving different vehicle types must be allocated between occupants and nonoccupants of a particular vehicle type. Four methods for allocating costs among different vehicle types are considered, corresponding to different perspectives, including that of occupants of a vehicle and that of society under different property right assignments. Costs based on the four allocation methods for the United States as a whole and per vehicle mile are also estimated. The allocation method was found to have large effects on the relative magnitude of costs.

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