Nyffeler Cécile
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Introduction

Road-traffic accidents represent the ninth cause of death worldwide (Murray and Lopez, 1997). It is thus important to get some insight on which societal group might be more exposed to such hazards. A clear association could be made between the probability of injuries by car crashes and the poverty of the person which was hit during the crash (Aguero-Valverde and Jovanis, 2006).  This finding was supported by several other studies.  Siddiqui et al. (2012) were indeed likewise able to affirm that lower median household incomes could be associated with higher road-traffic accidents probability. 
The aim of this paper is to judge if those findings are applicable to the communal level and to be able to state that the people living in poorer neighborhoods are indeed more vulnerable to car crashes than wealthier regions of the municipality. The commune of Vernier, Switzerland, was selected on the grounds that it is a highly contrasted municipality, and might thus be representative of what may happen at larger scales.

Data

 Several vector layers and text files were used in order to proceed to this analysis. The vector layers were all provided by the OpenData service of the Canton of Geneva SITG. Geographical point data containing the accident locations and housings addresses were used, as well as polygon layers defining the extent of the municipality zone and the inhabited areas.  The inhabited areas were characterized using a hectometric grid. The demographic data about the allowances were probably taken from the Swiss Federal Office of statistics FSO (not clearly mentioned in the data set).