Wheelchair pedestrians are three times more likely to be involved in deadly car collisions.
Having to spend your life time in a wheelchair is like a death sentence for many people. Over the years, many steps have been taken in order to reintegrate wheelchair users in society. Signs have been put up, people were made aware and many facilities have been opened for them. But what about road safety. According to a recent study, it would seem that people in wheelchairs are prone to car accidents.
The study itself stressed out the fact that wheelchair users are 3 times more likely to be involved in potentially deadly car accident, than people who do not require a wheelchair. Moreover, taking a look in-depth, it would appear that the situation becomes even more dramatic when we take into account a parameter such as gender.
Male wheelchair owners are 5 times more at risk than females to suffer a car accident. According to Government estimates, each year approximately 5000 pedestrians are killer in road accidents and more than 76.000 suffer cripple injury and require immediate hospitalization.
The study not only concludes the fact that disabled pedestrians are at risk of losing their lives on the road, but that the system itself needs to be reevaluated. Drivers need to be made more aware of wheelchair users and special facilities must be place in order to ensure pedestrian safety.
In order to find out how many disabled pedestrians were involved in car collisions, the team of researchers used a statistical method known as capture-recapture. This method is able to overlap two independent but somehow incomplete data sources. The investigators were very interested in the number of road accidents between the years 2006 and 2012.
The numbers clearly showed that a wheelchair pedestrian is much more vulnerable on the road that any other pedestrian. People in wheelchairs are prone to car accidents, an early estimates entail that wheelchair users are 3 times more likely to suffer from a car collision.
Male wheelchair users face far greater odds than women. Estimates have shown that a male wheelchair pedestrian is 5 times more likely to be involved in a deadly car collision that a female. Moreover, it would seem that the most vulnerable male wheelchair users are those with ages between 50 and 64 years old.
Additional numbers stated that the most gruesome car collisions, involving wheelchair pedestrian, happened in busy intersections. Circa 48 percent of all car accidents took place in crowded intersection and most of them were fatal. Another reason why wheelchair pedestrian fatalities are so high is due to the fact that many drivers didn’t give way to wheelchair users.
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