A new tool has been developed in an effort to help local authorities identify the roads with the highest collision rates in their area.
Produced by Agilysis, an associate company of Road Safety Analysis, the new resource uses ‘cutting-edge’ analysis methodologies – combining route analysis and predictive modelling reports to identify high-risk roads.
The 10 sites with the highest collisions risk are then processed the using the Newcastle University RAPTOR tool to predict mean future collision numbers, taking into account trend and regression to mean.
Agilysis says this process smooths outs ‘blips’ in the data and delivers an estimated future collision rate assuming no changes are made to the route.
Reports can be delivered to local authorities within two weeks and are priced based on the length of road analysed. GIS (Geographical Information System) outputs can be provided either for use on local systems or through embedded web maps.
Agilysis says the reports offer an ‘excellent introduction to road risk on local networks’ and are an alternative to standard cluster analysis methodologies.
Richard Owen, Agilysis CEO, showcased the new resource at the 2017 Road Safety Wales Conference on 22 June, when he presented the results of an all-Wales analysis of rural A and B class roads.
Click here for more information and to view sample maps and reports.
No actually – my comments assume that the highways and traffic staff are very familiar with the roads on their patch because it’s their job and yes, they do comment to themselves and their colleagues involved in this field, as and when when they recognized the high-risk locations (not necessarily the same as high collision locations).
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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Your comments assume that the officer lives in the borough or district in which he is actively engaged upon the task as a road safety officer. Unfortunately I don’t believe that this is the case in the majority of circumstances. Many officers live far away and commute into work and as such their realistic view of the local streets may be somewhat limited. I doubt as they are driving around they comment to themselves that that is a particularly dangerous street or that there are too many cars parked in that area and that junction needs a new stop line painted, or the road is dangerous and needs resurfacing etc.
I would expect them however to be able to clearly remember what where and when incidents or collisions occurred and therefore be able to identify some localities that have by history of such incidents become a hot spot. If they have, then I would expect that some action or intervention would already have taken place in order to alleviate the situation at that particular site.
s worthington manchester
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Further to my last comment and at the risk of stating the obvious perhaps, local council’s highways and traffic staff, by virtue of them driving around their respective patches and with an ‘ear to the ground’ as it were, would have a pretty good idea from observation alone which are the high-risk roads, as indeed would any of us around where we live and drive because we become so familiar with the routes and get to recognize where road users may make mistakes and where collisions are likely. Stats may well confirm and corroborate up to a point, but cannot possibly paint the full picture.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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The local authority I used to work for had been able to do this sort of thing for some time with their own resources, so I presume other LAs could as well. In addition, LAs would have the local knowledge and first-hand experience of the roads which remote statistical analysis would lack.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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This is a very useful tool, but surely it presupposes that you are using location based changes to road or infrastructure. We often find that one of the largest cluster of casualties in an area is the group of un-clustered casualties. These can rarely be addressed with a single location based change but require a wide-area change which may be legal or behaviour.
Hence I would caution against thinking of or prioritising road safety intervention only in terms of location based solutions around local clusters of casualties.
Rod King, Warrington, Cheshire, 20’s Plenty for Us
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