More Serious

Serious 2

More data about the strange behaviour of the serious injury figures

Introduction

This page provides further information in support of our page "serious". The "serious" page points out that our national serious road injury figures are behaving strangely relative to killed and slight injury figures.

It was suggested to us that the altered ratios might be due to vehicle air bags or some other localised effect. We investigated ratios across road user types and across road types. In all cases the serious injury figures exhibit the same strange behaviour.

See the graphs below:

Why are the pedestrian and cyclist figures less affected by the anomaly in recent years?

The random nature of the HGV and bus and coach figures reflect the low number of deaths in these categories

Even so, the HGV trend looks bad.

This graph shows falling trends in the serious injuries / all injuries ratio for all road user groups

Serious injuries have reduced about twice as fast as fatalities or all injuries for pedestrians and cyclists
If there has been a 15% reduction in walking, there will have been no safety improvement for pedestrians and cyclists

The strange behaviour of the serious injury figures is clear in this large road user group

Since speed limiters were installed across the board in heavy vehicles fatalities have risen very markedly.

Small numbers of injuries (and especially fatalities) make it hard to be sure about the trends for bus and coach occupants.

The serious injuries / all injuries ratio is falling for all road types

This graph shows rising trends in the killed / serious injury ratio for all road types

This graph shows no overall trend in the killed / all severities ratio

Comments

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