10 minute read
Fighting death on our roads
As UK road deaths rise, safety organizations are calling for new measures to reverse the trend. Could a new Geographical Information System be part of the solution?
Words | Tom Stone
While the long-term trend for numbers of road deaths in the western world is an overall reduction, road authorities and law enforcement agencies must be constantly vigilant and inventive in order to maintain this trend. The lower figures become, the greater the risk that they will plateau, or even begin to creep up again. This fear was reignited in the UK, in autumn 2017, when the Department for Transport (DfT) released the casualty figures for the nation’s roads in 2016, and they showed a marked increase on the previous year.
The DfT figures revealed that 1,792 people were killed in collisions in 2016, up 4% since 2015, and the highest annual total since 2011. A further 24,101 people were seriously injured in 2016, a rise of 9% (from 22,144 in 2015).
Left: The overall
trend in road deaths in the UK since 2006 is downward. However, recent years have seen a plateau and even a slight rise in figures
Many of the fatalities involved vulnerable road users, with pedestrian deaths up by 10% to 448, compared with 2015, and cyclist deaths up by 2% to 102. The number of children killed was also up – by 28% from 2015, with 69 under-15s dying in 2016. However, the number of motorcyclists killed was down by 13% from 365 to 319, despite an increase in the number motorbikes on the road.
“When there’s an increase in traffic with economic growth, generally casualty statistics do tend to go up, but this in no way justifies these shocking figures,” says Nick Lloyd, road safety manager at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). “Britain traditionally has one of the best road safety records in the world, but we must focus our efforts through effective education, engineering and enforcement if we are to make our roads safer. More than 90% of road crashes involve human error, which demonstrates the need for drivers to concentrate at all times, watch their speed, and avoid distractions.”
How can the trend be reversed?
The news led to calls from several quarters for more detailed analysis and dissemination of road safety data. The idea being that if road authorities and drivers are better equipped with information about where accidents are likely to happen, then they can be avoided, through better road design, deployment of smarter infrastructure and speed enforcement hardware, and through more careful driving.
Jason Wakeford, director of campaigns, Brake
“The increase in road casualties reinforces the need for the establishment of a UK road collision investigation branch to gather and make available better data to provide the evidence base to reduce the number of fatalities and injuries on our roads,” says Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) academy director Richard Cuerden.
His words are echoed by Jason Wakeford, director of campaigns for the UK road safety charity Brake. “Progress on road safety has stalled, pressing the need for a road collision investigation branch, so that lessons can be learned to prevent future crashes,” he says.
Data to the rescue
But, ahead of any the establishment of any official investigation body, and just a few days after the traffic data was released, software engineers at Buchanan Computing announced they had uploaded all the new data onto their Geographical Information System (GIS) CollisionMap (www. collisionmap.uk), making the raw data much more easily understood through a visual geographic interpretation, and also making them the first to republish the new DfT data in its entirety.
The web application is based upon the latest Ordnance Survey mapping and Buchanan’s Traffweb web mapping tool. It has a detailed gazetteer to find the location a user is interested in, and a number of unique selection and display features. It shows all accident locations even when zoomed out, giving a full indication of safety issues
Right: The GIS CollisionMap
gives a comprehensive overview of all serious accidents in the UK since 2011
Below right: Only
motorcyclists escaped the recent upward trend in UK road deaths
over a large area. This is particularly useful for rural locations or for looking at whole authorities. All road traffic collisions between January 1, 2011 and January 1, 2017, which took place in Britain and resulted in an injury or fatality, can now be accessed on the platform.
The swift publication of the data was made possible in part by the UK government’s new open data policy. The data was released under the new Open Government Licence (OGL), which is designed to foster innovation.
“We downloaded the files from the DfT’s site and imported them into our in-house-developed accident analysis system, AccsMap,” explains Alex Smith, managing director of Buchanan Computing. “We then processed and published the data on to CollisionMap’s staging site for checking, before making it live The whole process can be done quickly. Over the past three years, we have updated CollisionMap with the latest data within five working days.”
However, the initial development of the CollisionMap platform required many more hours
Intelligent System for Physical Speed Reduction
Alex Smith, managing director, Buchanan Computing to require users to register, to track their use, or to give them one more password to remember. Now in its fourth year, we hope to continue to provide this service free of charge for many years to come.”
Practical ways forward
Accurate data analysis can help to inform tangible improvements that can be made to roads in the form of upgrades such as advanced crash barriers, more visible signage, and speed enforcement.
“The first thing that strikes you when looking at this data displayed over a map of Britain is that it looks like a comprehensive atlas of the country’s road network, defined by road traffic accidents,” says Smith. “Any workable solutions to help reduce the number of accidents will be complex and may be applicable at a national, regional or local level.
“Our core accident analysis application, AccsMap, is very widely used by both police and local government road safety teams,” Smith continues. “By utilizing its analytical tools, a heat map showing accident rates for the entire road network can be achieved. This can be used to help access existing speed limits or the impact of new speed limits such as on rural roads. Once generated, the resultant heat maps can be published for use within CollisionMap, or into one of its sister Traffweb applications.”
New speed limits are just one of the safety-enhancing road upgrades that can be implemented by authorities, and part of accident prevention charity Brake’s raft of suggestions it believes will help:“We are calling for the introduction of a graduated licensing system, including a minimum learning period and restrictions for newly qualified drivers; a review of speed limits on rural roads, where most deaths occur; and for Voluntary Intelligent Speed Adaptation to be fitted as standard to new cars,
Above: In the more densely
populated parts of the UK, the CollisionMap view is crowded with accident information
Below: But zoom in and the
picture becomes much clearer
than that, and programmers had to overcome a number of challenges before it first went live in 2013. “A particular challenge was providing the data in a visually appealing way, overlaying national mapping, which allows users to zoom into their areas of interest,” says Smith. “This is combined with other navigation aids, such as an effective gazetteer to find places of interest. Also, as we have a long-term commitment to this work, we needed to ensure that it allowed for fast and efficient ways to maintain and update both the application and data.”
CollisionMap is a completely free service, something that Smith is proud of and hopes to continue far into the future. “The spirit and purpose of the open data set provided by the DfT is to help facilitate sharing of information, in order to better understand and reduce injuries and deaths that occur on Britain’s roads,” he says. “As a company, we share this view and are happy to contribute this application to the wider community. To make the data as open and accessible to all, we decided not
Road safety software solutions
Buchanan Computing is a leading supplier of software and training for traffic professionals and a specialist in web mapping and software hosting. It has over 20 years’ experience of computer mapping (GIS), software design and data management for the highway. Its range of products for highway and traffic engineers and the police includes SignPlot, ParkMap and AccsMap: the UK’s best-selling systems for traffic sign design, traffic order management and road collision analysis, respectively.
“All our applications provide traffic managers and their teams with IT-jargon-free applications attuned for their needs,” says managing director Alex Smith. ”Together, they have the greater potential to provide positive feedback loops, where each specialist can benefit from sharing their data. For example, users can see if a new traffic order had a positive impact on accident rates, or use accident location to identify sites for passive safety signs.”
Above: The DfT stats reveal the
breakdown of accidents by road and road-user type
as part of proposals being considered by the European Commission,” says Wakeford.
Smith agrees that, increasingly, auto manufacturers must play a role in helping to improve safety on our roads – particularly as we look to a future of connected and autonomous vehicles. “I believe that this data set, especially when processed with other data sets such as traffic flows and combined with information on the road network, will be used to help drive the sophisticated algorithms required for autonomous and connected vehicles,” he says. “In particular, they will be an input into the artificial intelligence required, where the vehicle’s alertness and responsiveness is set by its environment and the level of risk it may encounter. So autonomous vehicles can be programmed to behave in much the same way as a good driver does.”
Vision Zero
As the UK’s KSI (killed or seriously injured) stats begin to creep upward, one could be forgiven for thinking that the drive toward Vision Zero should be abandoned as impractical. However, whether
or not such an aim is ultimately achievable, Smith is firmly of the belief that we must continue to strive for greater safety. “The visionary aim of zero deaths on our roads is a laudable goal, whether or not it is practically possible to achieve this,” he says. “Road safety is very important, but it is not the sole area where unnecessary deaths and injuries occur. And we do not live in closed, single-issue systems. I feel that risk encountered when using the highway should be no higher than the normal level of risk encountered in everyday life. If we were to lose sight of targets, it would be a detrimental step as there would be a loss of a very helpful form of incentive and structure.”
TRL’s Richard Cuerden agrees: “It is imperative that road safety is given the same level of attention as that of air and rail. It is essential that future casualty prevention strategies are informed by latest trends, such as the digital revolution and rapid development of vehicle technologies, change in mobility habits, and the rise in active travel. Only in this way can we ensure that casualty prevention strategies are not only fit for purpose, but future-proofed, too.” n
