Contributory factors to road accidents.

Author(s)
Mosedale, J. Purdy, A. & Clarkson, E.
Year
Abstract

The STATS19 national system of collection of information on road accidents involving human injury gives considerable information about the circumstances of the accident including who the victims are, what types of vehicle are involved and what they are doing at the time of the accident and the general conditions at the time. However, it does not include information on the main reasons why road accidents happen. Regular information at a national level would assist in directing the work on improving safety within the Government’s Road Safety Strategy. In the 1997 Review of the Collection of Road Accident Statistics, there was a proposal that contributory factors should be collected as part of the STATS19 data collection system. Although this was not adopted at the time, it was decided that the collection of data could proceed on a voluntary, trial basis. Fifteen police forces chose to participate in the trial and have been collecting data using the specification proposed at the time. The trial has provided information on contributory factors for about a quarter of all reported road accidents in Great Britain since 1999. In the consultation for the 2002-03 Quality Review of the Collection of Road Accident Statistics, some concerns were expressed about this trial system. A special study of contributory factor information collected in the trial and in a variety of systems adopted by other police forces was undertaken and published in March 2004 as Road Safety Research Report No. 43. As a result, a substantially revised specification is to be introduced from January 2005 and will be adopted by all police forces as an integral part of the STATS19 collection system. The new specification will provide comprehensive contributory factor data for the whole of Great Britain but will not be directly comparable with data collected during the trial. This article presents some of the results and conclusions of the trial. It should be noted that the statistics from the trial presented in this article are not National Statistics. (Author/publisher)

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Publication

Library number
C 30287 [electronic version only]
Source

London, Department for Transport (DfT), Transport Statistics: Road Safety, 2004, 13 p.

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