Every death on every road in Great Britain 1999-2010

December 28, 2011 9:47 AM

The BBC has put up a page presenting statistics dealing with deaths on British roads between 1999 and 2010. A slightly older page presenting mostly the same statistics (up to 2008) can be visited here; this earlier version was published in conjunction with several other articles, including one looking in-depth at a single crash and its aftermath in Stevenage in 2007.
posted by Dim Siawns (13 comments total)

Americans and others: if you don't know any postcodes, it still takes city names.
posted by desjardins at 9:55 AM on December 28, 2011

Previously posted a similar map here... but this seems to give more details on the accidents.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:01 AM on December 28, 2011

333 people died on the roads in Aberdeenshire local authority

Twice as high as anyplace in London and almost as high as Birmimgham, but in the middle of no where. Long way to the pub? Bad roads? Bad drivers?
posted by three blind mice at 11:58 AM on December 28, 2011

Less public transport, greater need to drive, less good weather and lighting, more open roads to attain high speeds.
posted by Jehan at 1:21 PM on December 28, 2011

Birmingham and Aberdeenshire really are apples and oranges.

Birmingham is only 100 square miles or so and (according to google) you can get from top to toe in 40 minutes - without blue lights. With half a dozen hospitals scattered across it, the time for the ambulance to get to you and take you to the hospital (ignoring roadside time) is probably 15-20 minutes.

Aberdeenshire is 2500 square miles and consists mostly of open countryside. At a guess, it takes about 3 hours to get from one side to the other, and blue lights probably don't speed you up any. Half the hospitals look like local ones, so there's probably only half a dozen across the county. You're probably lucky if the amubulance can get to you in under 30 minutes. Then another 30 minutes back to the hospital. And that's after someone has seen your accident and called 999.

Aberdeenshire also spends a quarter of the year as a cold, wet, dark, skidpan...
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 1:36 PM on December 28, 2011

Pause for thought, innit? Driving really is the most dangerous thing we do on a routine basis and we get behind with barely a thought. And then freak out about alleged one in a million risks attached to vaccination, etc. People: bad at risk evaluation.
posted by dmt at 1:40 PM on December 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

There's a missing 'the wheel' up there. Sigh...
posted by dmt at 1:42 PM on December 28, 2011

Twice as high as anyplace in London and almost as high as Birmimgham, but in the middle of no where. Long way to the pub? Bad roads? Bad drivers?

Rural areas have a larger number of accidents than expected. Remember hearing that it tends to be people who do the same route on a regular basis (like travelling to work etc) so they know they road well and there is less traffic and are subsequently not paying the same amount of attention they would on unknown roads or where there are a lot more road users to contend with. They then tend to be caught out by the sudden unexpected thing that wasn't there yesterday - patch of black ice, car suddenly on wrong side of the road etc.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:47 PM on December 28, 2011

Driving really is the most dangerous thing we do on a routine basis and we get behind with barely a thought.

If there was anything else killing 2-3000 people a year in the UK the tabloids etc would go ape-shit about it, not kinda encourage through the likes of Clarkson etc
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:49 PM on December 28, 2011

Interestingly, the majority of the random incidents I clicked on in Birmingham were ped vs bus or lorry while quite a lot of the ones in Aberdeenshire were single vehicle incidents with drivers in their 20s or 70s...
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 1:50 PM on December 28, 2011

If there was anything else killing 2-3000 people a year in the UK the tabloids etc would go ape-shit about it, not kinda encourage through the likes of Clarkson etc

1970 deaths (in 2010) is, literally, just a statistic.
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 2:03 PM on December 28, 2011

three blind mice: "333 people died on the roads in Aberdeenshire local authority

Twice as high as anyplace in London and almost as high as Birmimgham, but in the middle of no where. Long way to the pub? Bad roads? Bad drivers?"

When my dad was in government, he had to look into signing or re-engineering a twisty section of highway sandwiched between a cliff and a lake because he and his constituents thought it was dangerous. An engineer was nice enough to pull him aside and let him know that the arrow-straight, level stretch with perfect visibility 2km away actually had far more fatalities. The reason? A gas station and a passing lane. High speeds and distractions.

Sometimes it isn't the obvious things that make for dangerous driving.
posted by klanawa at 2:48 PM on December 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Strange seeing Stevenage on the front page of MeFi, one town over from where I was born and grew up; even stranger knowing I took my family there this year and knowing we drove around that roundabout, possibly even stopped in the lay-by the van pulled out of; stranger still knowing my mum may have taken the 999 call in the Police call center in Welwyn that night.

What a harrowing story - made me tear up just reading it, and knowing that the same story plays out hundreds of times a day the world over is almost unbearable.
posted by kcds at 4:50 PM on December 28, 2011