6 ms·

Every death on every road in Great Britain 1999-2010

51 points by ed209 15y ago

ed209 15y ago
similar to the recent US version http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295856 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295856
- ck2 15y ago
  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.
  - CapitalistCartr 15y ago
    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.
- brynjar 15y ago
  "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.
  - tankenmate 15y ago
    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?
    - ed209 15y ago
      time to put money and effort where it will make the biggest impact.
SagelyGuru 15y ago
This is a lot more effective than the speed cameras. One thing that surprised me is the number of pedestrians killed.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Also, TopGear mentioned that speed cameras haven't affected death rates at all. They're just for money to the state.
  - andyking 15y ago
    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.
    - to3m 15y ago
      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.
    - maximusprime 15y ago
      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.
      - to3m 15y ago
        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!
bambax 15y ago
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.
- sambeau 15y ago
  Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom
SamColes 15y ago
Shocking (yet unsurprising) that almost everything I click on is an eldery pedestrian or cyclist, or a motorcyclist.
- nodata 15y ago
  or HGV
tcarnell 15y ago
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.
willyt 15y ago
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.
- bigfudge 15y ago
  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.
  - eblackburn 15y ago
    w00t! Another Cornishman on HN. Kernow bys vyken! :-D
- barrkel 15y ago
  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/18/road-casualty-uk-map 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.
maximusprime 15y ago
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.

51 points by ed209 15y ago

ed209 15y ago

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

ck2 15y ago
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.
- CapitalistCartr 15y ago
  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.
brynjar 15y ago
"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.
- tankenmate 15y ago
  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?
  - ed209 15y ago
    time to put money and effort where it will make the biggest impact.

SagelyGuru 15y ago

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

sukuriant 15y ago
Also, TopGear mentioned that speed cameras haven't affected death rates at all. They're just for money to the state.
- andyking 15y ago
  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.
  - to3m 15y ago
    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.
  - maximusprime 15y ago
    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.
    - to3m 15y ago
      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!

bambax 15y ago

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.

sambeau 15y ago
Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom

SamColes 15y ago

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

nodata 15y ago
or HGV

tcarnell 15y ago

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.

willyt 15y ago

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.

bigfudge 15y ago
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.
- eblackburn 15y ago
  w00t! Another Cornishman on HN. Kernow bys vyken! :-D
barrkel 15y ago
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/18/road-casualty-uk-map 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.

maximusprime 15y ago

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.