Two years of death and serious injury on Northern Ireland’s roads

This is a data blog guest post by Kathryn Torney, from the Detail:

2014 was a particularly bad year on the roads in Northern Ireland with 79 people losing their lives.

But it’s not only deaths that have an impact, serious injuries caused by crashes can also be life changing and include people adapting to using a wheelchair or attempting to rebuild their lives with a severe brain injury.

Millions of pounds have been spent on hard-hitting advertising campaigns which highlight the dangers of speed, mobile phone use and drink driving. But people continue to die.

Detail Data, a joint project between investigative news website the Detail and the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA), decided to examine two years of collisions in Northern Ireland and to go beyond the headline death figures.

We wanted to know how many people had been seriously injured, the most common causes of crashes, whether other factors like road type or speed limit make a difference and the gender and age breakdown of the casualties.

As well as analysing the data, we wanted to have strong storytelling which would bring the numbers to live with real people, real crashes and real stories.

Funded by the Big Lottery Fund Northern Ireland, one of the main aims is to link closely with local community and voluntary groups so we turned to them to help us to tell the stories behind the data.

Using Freedom of Information legislation, we requested Police Service of Northern Ireland statistics relating to 1,321 collisions in 2013 and 2014 which led to the death or serious injury of drivers, passengers, cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians.

In total 136 people were killed across Northern Ireland and 1,430 were seriously injured.

We asked for a detailed breakdown of all fatal and serious collisions which took place over two years and received this in Excel format.

Collisions are categorised as either ‘fatal’, ‘serious’ or ‘slight’ according to the most severely injured casualty. ‘Killed’ covers anyone dying within 30 days from injuries received in a collision. ‘Serious’ relates to people staying in hospital or injuries which include fractures, concussion, internal injuries, burns and severe cuts. Detail Data decided to omit ‘slight’ collisions from our analysis.

The data received from the PSNI includes the date, time and location for each incident, road type, speed limit on the road and light, weather and road conditions.

We also received a breakdown of the age and gender of all of the casualties involved in fatal and serious collisions over the two-year period. The casualty information was on a separate spreadsheet but a unique identifier column allowed us to connect casualties to each collision.

Separately, the PSNI sent us information on seatbelt use and causation factors over a five-year period (2010-2014).

The police statistics only relate to collisions that take place on public roads. And it’s important to note that not all collisions are reported to the police.

Our key findings include that Fermanagh was the police area in Northern Ireland with the highest death toll from collisions.

And of all the 129 fatal collisions recorded over the two year period, 74 per cent took place on rural roads where there are speed limits of over 40m/ph. There was only one fatal crash on a motorway.

Disturbingly, almost a quarter of the people killed on Northern Ireland’s roads in the last two years were young men aged between 17 and 24.

Of all deaths, almost 80 per cent were male.

Despite the common perception that drivers are now well aware of the dangers of drink driving, this remains a serious issue. The top three principal causes of fatal collisions over the last five years in Northern Ireland were drink driving, followed by excessive speed and then inattention/attention diverted.

Data was used to create graphics, including one showing the gender breakdown of casualties and another which gives a breakdown of the data for every local PSNI area.

An interactive map was also created; it shows the location of every fatal and serious crash. Readers can use the map to access other detailed information on each collision, like the speed limit on the road, weather conditions and a breakdown of the casualties.

The data received had the location of each crash in easting/northing format. We used a batch converter to change this to latitude/longitude format.

Once the data was analysed, interviews were carried out - these highlighted the emotional cost of death and serious injury on our roads.

For more on Detail Data's findings go tothedetail.tv/data

For figures from the Republic of Ireland, go to irishtimes.com/news/environment/crash-report