Every death on every road in Great Britain 1999-2010 | Hacker News Reader

Every death on every road in Great Britain 1999-2010

bbc.co.uk

51 pointsed20929 comments

I live in the Scottish Highlands, It's interesting that there are almost no deaths on the single track roads where the speed limit is 60mph and road alignments often allow for travelling at this speed, assuming you have correctly judged the stopping distance to avoid a head on collision with someone round the next corner at 60mph in the opposite direction. And I can tell you, people do cut it pretty fine. But there are quite a lot of fatal crashes on normal roads in places which I would have thought are reasonably safe. I wonder if a lot of crashes here are caused by risky overtaking caused by frustrated people stuck behind slow moving vehicles. Seems like there is often a goods vehicle involved. I have this theory that people are much more likely to crash if they are bored than if the driving is taxing their abilities a bit.

I live in rural Cornwall and see the same pattern, but the reason is probably exposure. So few people drive our roads that even if the risk was much greater you would still see far fewer deaths.

w00t! Another Cornishman on HN. Kernow bys vyken! :-D

I've ridden motorbikes a few times on some narrow country roads in the UK - when creating a route for a GPS, it's not always apparent how wide the road is going to end up being.

And as a result, several times I've had to ride almost into the ditch, as I come around a corner cautiously at about 20mph (national speed limit road) and am faced with a 4x4 doing 40mph, who only notices me at the last second and makes a disturbingly exaggerated swerve away from me. To the point that now, when I see my route is going down what looks to be a narrow road, I just find a different path.

And that's where my other problem with interpreting these visualizations comes from: they'd be hugely more useful if there was some way of normalizing them with respect to journey count. Then you'd know whether the road has a high rate owing to being dangerous, or simply has a lot of traffic and may actually be safer than average.

For this purpose, the variant of the map that includes serious and slight injuries would be more useful - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/nov... - but keep the individual incidents "smeared out", as it were, and modulate somehow with the amount of traffic.

I'm pretty sure not all deaths are featured on this map. I checked stretches of road where I know there have been deaths near my spot of rural North Wales. Those deaths weren't on this map for some reason.

I'm pleased you posted the above. I visit the Highlands often (and love it) and realised that the locals drive incredibly quickly on these single-track roads - with passing places - and wondered what the accident rate was. After a few years I figured that they raced like crazy in the places where they could see and then braking sharply before corners. I bet the brake wear must be high!! Great place though!! I got married in Glenfinnan

That's the interesting thing, once you 'know the road' you know all the places where you can't see the road surface but because you know where the road is in the terrain ahead you can make optimised judgements about visibility to oncoming traffic, comfortable cornering speed etc. Also you'll know which corners have passing places which allow two vehicles to pass comfortably at speed. A lot of people not used to single track roads are frightened by local drivers coming round corners 'too fast'. Often it's because people don't realise that to keep on the left you need to take an extreme outside line which means steering away from the corner into a passing place and back again as you go around. I tell people this when they come to visit and they usually find it a lot less stressful driving here afterwards.

Since I had a glancing collision on a single track road last year (UK greenbelt outside London), I've been much more cautious to the point of avoiding them sometimes.

I don't know any UK postal code but found that "NW1" will get you near the center of London. Once the map is active you can go to any place in the UK.

It would be interesting to filter by other criteria: year, age of people injured are two pieces of information that are already available.

Brand of vehicule, estimated speed at impact, cause of accident, DUI, etc. would make for very interesting criteria if they are recorded.

Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom

similar to the recent US version http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295856

Wow, US interstates are simply paved with death.

From what I can see, it's not just speed that kills but people-interacting-with-people at speed that kills.

Because the 50-60mph backroads seem to have low death rates.

Yes, with a death toll around 50k per year for decades, concentrated in the populous, urban areas, that's about right. If there were a little roadside symbol at the spot for each person who ever died, many areas would look like a forest. I look to self-driving cars to save us from this.

"paved with death" indeed. I want to see a U.S. deaths due to terrorist attacks map plot to see how sparse that would be by comparison - 911 excepted.

I think you'd find that the number of people killed on US roads would exceed the number of dead from 9/11 in a little over 2 months.

Time for the war on driving / vehicle accidents?

time to put money and effort where it will make the biggest impact.

This is a lot more effective than the speed cameras. One thing that surprised me is the number of pedestrians killed.

Also, TopGear mentioned that speed cameras haven't affected death rates at all. They're just for money to the state.

Top Gear is an entertainment show with an agenda all of its own (I don't know if you're in Britain, but Jeremy Clarkson is a well-known self-described 'controversial' right-winger with his own column in the Sun.)

I wouldn't take anything they come out with as fact without another source.

Well, people DO often say that criminals should pay a penalty for their crimes :)

You are right about Clarkson, though - he is a troll, plain and simple.

Penalizing drivers based on their speed is like paying programmers based on lines of code.

Speed != safety.

Lines of code != productivity.

It teaches motorists that instead of watching out for dangers, they should be constantly monitoring their speedometer. It makes our roads less safe.

Jeremy Clarkson is awesome. He should be made a lord. The liberal lefties and the easily offended hate him. Which is fantastic to watch. 20,000 complaints to the BBC after he made a joke about strikes? How absolutely hilarious.

You're right! I've been involved in a couple of low-speed bumps in car parks, going at 10mph, people not looking where they are going, that kind of thing. It was AWFUL, dreadfully worrying, and the car was a total mess. In one case, my car even ended up with a visible scratch on the driver's-side door paintwork.

If only I'd have been driving on the road, going at 50mph, like that time when the car skidded on something on the road, and after hitting the edge flipped over and landed on its roof in a muddy ditch. Unlike the dangerous dents and scratches that my car park accidents have left my car with, this little minor incident only left the roof a little bit crushed in, and broke one of the wheels off. Also smashed out all the windows. So there wasn't even any need to call the AA, not like that time somebody opened their door into my car at 0mph and left a little nick in the plastic runner bar.

My only regret is that thanks to the nanny state I couldn't legally have gone at 100mph to make it even safer yet!

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but in the hands of a master it is true genius!

It's the equivalent of restricting programmers "lines of code typed per hour" in the misguided belief that will reduce bugs.

In my old neighbourhood in Birmingham, around 75% of the deaths are of either young or elderly pedestrians. I'd like to see if there is a higher instance of injuries at those locations as well. As it may be location based, rather than possibly driver or pedestrian error.

Shocking (yet unsurprising) that almost everything I click on is an eldery pedestrian or cyclist, or a motorcyclist.

or HGV

I'm quite surprised at the lack of 'hot spots' - areas of concentrated fatalities. Had a quick look at some areas I have lived in, including SE11 (south/central London), especially around Elephant & Castle am quite surprised that actually, there are generally fairly few fatalities when considering this spans a decade of data.

Obviously pedestrians and cyclists are far more at risk of being a fatality, so the stats certainly dont represent general accidents, even serious ones.

What would be fantastic would be to overlay the speedcamera locations on the same map.

What people would then see, is that there is no correlation between speed cameras and "accident blackspots".

If you were able to also plot "hidden hedges" and "shouldn't be a 30mph limit in the first place", you'd see that's where the speed cameras are placed, to generate maximum revenue.

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