A few years ago, I was writing a paper about roads and was astonished to find out that the cost of reported and unreported road accidents was £35 billion, 10 years ago. This is really quite close to crime at approx £50 billion. So why aren’t we doing more about it when accidents are by definition not committed intentionally?
Reducing accidents ought to be much easier than reducing crime. The first step though is to know exactly where and when they are happening. Fortunately the government has released 10 years data to this effect which unlike crime data, are very data and location specific. Now on UKCrimeStats you can actually query and see it straight away from our new Accidents page;
E.g. Which Police Force, Constituency, Postcode Sector, Metropolitan Ward etc. had the most/least/greatest increase/decrease in accidents between your selected month and year?
You can also run a heatmap for any of the shapes as well, so you can see at a glance where most of the accidents are happening. I will create a couple of instruction videos for you to see how this works. Intelligent intervention by local authorities and the Highways Authority based on this locational accident data ought to drive down the number, cost and of course human tragedy behind accidents.