Safety Investments and Operating Conditions: Determinants of Accident Passenger-Vessel Damage Cost

Econometric transportation research heretofore has focused on the likelihood of the occurrence of safety related events (event probability), e.g., investigating determinants of accident rates.' However, the risk of travel to the passenger (i.e., the probability of sustaining injury or death) not only has the aspect of probability but also the aspect of severity conditional probability-the severity of the given that it has occurred.2 Hence, an alternative (to probability) for investigating the risk of travel is to focus on the severity of safety related events. Since the severity of a safety related event is conditioned upon the occurrence of the event, the and severity conditional probabilities of safety related events are expected to have common determinants.