Interactive road safety map reveals safest and most dangerous accident hotspots in the UK

The worst traffic accident hotspots in the UK and the safest roads to live on, have been revealed after analysis of the latest Department for Transport collision data statistics by Collisionmap, a free interactive road safety mapping tool, developed by transport data and mapping company, Buchanan Computing. The tool is designed to improve road safety across the UK by allowing anybody to search accident rates in their postcode area.

The latest statistics show that roads in the South East of England fared worst for those Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI) in road traffic collisions in 2021, closely followed by London. The safest roads were found in the North East of England where the number of recorded KSIs was approximately 4.5 times lower.

Whilst the number of accident and casualties have increased throughout all regions, the rate of the year-on-year increase has been markedly different across the regions, resulting in a different picture. Yorkshire and Humber region fared the worst with the largest percentage increases, whilst Scotland moved to the best ranking with the smallest level of increase.

The picture changes again when the accident data is viewed as a proportion of the population for each region. London is shown to have the highest rate with 2997 casualties per million population, and Scotland with a rate just over 3 times lower, has by far the lowest rate with 939 casualties per million population. However, when it comes to fatalities, the position is reversed, with London’s rate of 8, being approximately 3 times lower than Scotland’s rate of 25 per million population.

CollisionMap is a unique mapping device that uses the latest DfT collision data from 2021 to:

• compare region, council area and postcode revealing the roads where you are most likely to have a road accident and those which are safest.
• It is the only interactive map which allows you to search by postcode to reveal percentage change in road accidents year on year
• It is also uniquely able to adjust for population density
• It can pinpoint accident hotspots using heatmaps in particular postcodes and allows users to see visualisations down to specific roads and exactly where accidents occurred.

Alex Smith, CEO of Buchanan Computing said:

“We have developed CollisionMap as a free and useful resource to improve road safety across the UK. It is available for anyone to use to track accident rates in their postcode area and compare them to the national picture and is already used by a number of Local Authorities around the country to share road safety and accident hotspots locally. CollisionMap is incredibly detailed so it will also show you with pinpoint accuracy on which roads the accidents occurred and uniquely it also adjusts the collision data according to population density, meaning that users can more accurately compare their own location with others or with the national picture.”

“We can see from the CollisionMap data that nationally, the picture for road traffic collisions is worse across the country compared to 2020, with the number increasing by 10.8% and casualties increasing on average by 11.2%. This is in part related to the increase in traffic in 2021, as a result of removal of lockdown measures in place for much of 2020. However, despite the rise in the overall numbers in 2021, the figures are not as high as we would have been expected after such a sharp fall in 2020, and they remained under 2019 figures as well. We need to bear in mind however that the numbers of journeys have not gone back to the same level as in 2019. Sadly, the number of those killed and seriously injured in traffic collisions, did rise significantly by 16.15% on average, which means that in 2020 there were nationally 19,741 KSI collisions rising to 22,755 in 2021.

Notes for Editors

1. All national and regional data can be found here at Collisionmap using a postcode search.

2. Please contact Katy Taylor at katytaylor@ttcommunications.co.uk or call 07896848425for more information.

3. Regional breakdown figures available for every region including Scotland and Wales.

3. Charts and images available.