This week is Road Safety Week and to commemorate the occasion Trusted Dealers has launched a new resource that breaks down nearly a decade and a half of figures about road safety in the UK – including accident rates, motoring offences, number of vehicles on the roads and traffic police levels.
Data Drive uses official statistics taken from between 2000 and 2013, divided into four areas related to road safety. This information is displayed as a line graph that shows the rise and fall of all four metrics over time and picks out points of interest, while more detailed information about each data set is shown below.
The graph highlights some shocking statistics about road safety, notably that the number of traffic police keeping roads safe declined by nearly a third between 2002 and 2012, going from 6,902 to 4,868 – despite the volume of traffic on the roads increasing steadily every year. However, the number of casualties and fatalities are falling every year with 2013 marking the safest year on record.
“It’s always encouraging to hear that deaths and injuries on the roads are declining, but the figures don’t always give a complete picture,” said Neil Addley, Managing Director at Trusted Dealers. “With Data Drive, we took a number of additional metrics into account – and while the roads do indeed appear to be becoming safer in terms of accidents, there is no room for complacency while we have fewer police overseeing a vastly increased number of motorists.”