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by Lib Dem team on 12 July, 2011
This is quite interesting (if you find this sort of thing interesting – I’m afraid that I do).
The DataGM site has collected data on all the road traffic accidents in Greater Manchester since 2002.
Then the people at the MEN used Google Fusion (which I probably ought to understand a lot better than I do) to map them all.
We seem to build up a lot of folk wisdom about which roads and junctions are dangerous, often based on one or two accidents we know about. This allows us to get an idea of how accurate those ideas are, and where the real accident hotspots are on our roads. Are they in the places we expect, or perhaps there’s a real danger spot that’s slipped by unnoticed.
This map from the MEN shows all 75,000 incidents since 2002.
This map shows just the 630 fatal accidents.
7 Comments
Potentially fascinating for a cyclist like me particularly but, without a colour key or some notion about what the severity codes mean, it is meaningless/frustrating.
Hi Les.
1 (red) = Fatal Accident: This is an accident in which at least one person is fatally injured, i.e., in which the person dies within thirty days of the accident as a result of injuries sustained.
2 (blue) = Serious Accidents: This is an accident in which nobody is fatally injured but at least one person is seriously injured, e.g., fracture, crushing, concussion. This category includes accidents in which casualties die on or after thirty days as a result of the accident.
3 (yellow) = Slight Accidents: This is an accident in which nobody is fatally or seriously injured but at least one person is slightly injured, e.g., sprains, bruises, minor cuts or slightly shock.
The original dataset includes which day of the week each accident happened on, but that isn’t on these maps. Would be interesting though (as would the times of day for accidents).
Amazing! I intend to pass your link on to the stockport branch of the Institute of Advanced Motorists (of which I am a member)for circulation. Many thanks for sharing!
And the Coalition Government encourages speed law breaking by not using speed camera evidence plus severe reduction in traffic police!
There’s long been an interesting debate, hotly contested on both sides, about whether speed cameras reduce accidents or not.
The most comprehensive evidence that I’ve heard is that speed cameras do appear to work, even when effects such as regression to the mean are taken into account.
For that reason, Stockport Council has not turned off speed cameras, though it remains up to each local authority which approach they take.
However, the story on road accidents is a lot more interesting than that.
Why, for example, have the number of casualties fallen fairly steadily and consistently over the decades, rather than in big jumps when significant changes like compulsory seat-belts came in? Our roads are safer today than they were in the 1930s, when there were very few cars around, but how much of the drop in accidents down to people not venturing out onto the roads any more?
I don’t have the answers, but I do know that when it comes to road safety, speed cameras are just the tip of the iceberg.
Looking at this map it only highlights why there should be double yellow lines at the top end of Oak Road as this already narrow junction is made worse by people parking along the side of the conservative club.
Good point Garry – we’ll look into it.