Traffic Violence: The Killer That Goes Unnoticed & Ignored

An 84 year old man died yesterday after being hit by a bus in Hillsborough, Sheffield. I’ve only lived here for 6 years or so, yet I can recall so many incidents like this in the area in which I live, far too many. There’s initial outrage or perhaps more likely talk of ‘a tragic accident’, then tolerance, then they are forgotten.

For every one of the 599 pedestrians injured in road collisions in South Yorkshire in 2013 there is a human story. A real person. 136 of these humans suffered serious injuries. 9 were killed.

In 2013 more of us died on South Yorkshire’s roads than because of violent crime, so where’s the outrage?

South Yorkshire Safer Roads Partnership, Collision Casualty Statistics 2013 http://www.lifewise999.co.uk/road-safety/road-safety-resources/safer-roads-partnership-documents

From my own monitoring of the South Yorkshire Police website, the gentleman who was killed yesterday was the 21st pedestrian aged 60 and over to be hit by a vehicle in the last 12 months in South Yorkshire. The majority of people suffered serious injuries and 4 died.

And remember, these are just the individual incidents that we KNOW about (where the police have issued appeals to the public on their website)

Time for a Sheffield version of this?

“The Weekly Carnage: a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five New York boroughs, by Streetsblog NYC

 

Before you go digging into road incident statistics, it’s important to understand a little about how they are reported and recorded.

STATS 19
In the case of traffic collisions where someone has been hurt, police officers should fill in something called a STATS 19 form (example here). The information collected from these is collated and is intended to help local and national government gather intelligence on road traffic incidents, feed into planning for road safety improvements and use of resources etc.. STATS 19 data should be collected for every incident in which someone is hurt.

STATS 19 data is publicly accessible here, but there is a LOT of it; you will need a fine tooth comb and will likely get disheartened if you’re not use to looking at such things. You will most likely have come across STATS 19 data which is used by local authorities when they release reports on local road collision statistics. This is more accessible, often with graphs and bite size summaries, but the detail is lost, as is the sense of individual victims as human beings. There are other services which provide the data is a more accessible way, such as crashmap, which charges a small fee to look at details of individual incidents.

Screenshot from crashmap.co.uk showing incidents involving pedestrians 2005-13 in area area Hillsborough Corner, Sheffield

 

Police Appeals for Information
Pages like these can be a good way of getting information about road incidents which have happened recently and if you want to build up a picture of something like pedestrian fatalities before the official figures have been released.

However you will only find information about incidents which are under investigation where the police are calling for information. Other incidents (the majority of road collisions) are not listed here.

Local Media
Often the only way to find out about road collisions in your area. Local newspapers frequently report such incidents, and may offer more detail than the police website and council reports. This can be the only way of finding out the ‘human side’ to an incident before it gets ‘lumped in’ with general statistics and fades away, unnoticed.