How the government is making road crash data more reliable

The Department for Transport has carried out a feasibility study into whether STATS19 road collision records can be matched to a digital road network, a step that could improve the accuracy and usefulness of the official figures that underpin road safety policy in the UK.

STATS19 is the long-established system the police use to record the details of road collisions, including where a crash happened, how serious it was, and who was involved. Those records feed into the national road casualty statistics that government, local councils and road safety researchers rely on. The difficulty has always been that a collision location logged by an officer at the roadside may not line up precisely with the digital maps and road network databases that planners use, which can lead to gaps and inconsistencies in the data.

The work assessed whether it is practical to take each collision record and link it automatically to the correct road segment on a digital network. If that can be done reliably, it becomes much easier to spot which specific stretches of road have repeated problems, to validate that the data has been recorded consistently, and to combine STATS19 figures with other road and traffic datasets in a meaningful way.

For everyday drivers, this kind of improvement to official data matters more than it might first appear. Decisions about where to install new speed cameras, improve junctions, add cycle lanes or upgrade street lighting are all shaped by casualty statistics. More accurate, better-linked data means those decisions are more likely to be directed at the places where they will do the most good, rather than being skewed by recording errors or location mismatches in the underlying records.