The IAM has analysed the DfT’s annual casualty stats to show that has the biggest increase in killed and seriously injured (KSI) collisions in 2012 occurred in the North East of England.
The IAM’s calculations show that the rate of reported KSI casualties in the North East increased by 8% in 2012 – an extra 65 KSI incidents – compared with the previous year. South East England, which the IAM says was one of the “worst” regions in 2011, has seen the biggest improvement with an 8% decrease in 2012.
While there was a 6% increase in KSI rates in South West England, there were reductions in the North West and West Midlands which cancelled out small increases in Yorkshire and Humber, East of England and London to give an overall reduction of 2% in accident rates for England.
The IAM says that a 2% increase has “pushed Yorkshire and Humberside to the top of the accident rate table”.
Simon Best, IAM chief executive, said: “Drivers across England should not be at higher risk just because of where they live. Additional funding should be available to those areas with greater road safety problems.
“What we need is a national road safety body with full responsibility for monitoring progress and bringing together best practice so that everyone benefits equally from safer roads.
According to the RAC Foundation “At the end of 2012 there were 34.5 million vehicles licensed for use on the roads in Great Britain”.
If they all do roughly ten journeys a week on average, in a year we cover a smidge under 20 BILLION journeys and people think we can make a valid statistical analysis of figures that change by the tens?
The only thing we can determine from these statistics with any degree of certainty is that they are completely uncertain and so it is strange that people tend to value them as if they were some sort of ultimate truth. If we really want to fix road accidents, then chuck these statistics away and concentrate insted on the frequency of accident types, not the frequency of accident outcomes.
Duncan MacKillop, Stratford on Avon
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Interesting how a statistic, when published by an organisation, can assume a level of significance which might otherwise not be warranted. The way these figures are presented here makes it look like some sort of competition. As has been pointed out in this forum before, accidents are random and so many variables affect where, how, when, why accidents occur – that’s even before the ‘under reporting’ factor is considered – that such apparent increases and decreases are not neccesarily significamt, or indicative of anything. This time next year it may have changed – or not. It’s also naive of the IAM to imply that these variations are somehow directly linked to funding.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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So has the IAM failed to take into account demographic variations?
The comment “Drivers across England should not be at higher risk just because of where they live” would suggest that they have not.
At a very basic level when there is an economic downturn expenditure may well fall. Cars are not serviced in the same way and as a result MOT failures by region may well vary greatly. Thus leading to vehicles which may well be less safe increasing crash rates and casualty rates.
You cannot get away from the fact that there are wide variances in living standards throughout the UK and this will ultimately filter down to road casualties. This is something that is beyond a suggested National Road Safety Body.
Keith
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