Crashmap Updates

26 September 2016

Five years after its creation, CrashMap, the award-winning website which allows members of the public to search for details of recorded injury collisions, has undergone a series of major upgrades with a roadmap for future updates in place.

The most significant change is the addition of collisions in Northern Ireland, the first time this data has been released in such detail.  The data from 2010 to 2014 was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as it is not published freely, unlike the data for Great Britain.  Although the level of detail is not as great it allows concerned members of the public, planners, and journalists free access to the maps and reports.  These show the date, time, location, speed limit and road type together with information about vehicle types, driver gender, age band, vehicle manoeuvre, as well as casualty profiles.  There is no charge for downloading individual collision reports in Northern Ireland.

All of this data, together with the existing GB information can now be queried more powerfully using the new twin-filter option for casualty and vehicle types.  Combinations of collision types can be reviewed for example, collisions involving an injured cyclist and a goods vehicle. 

The data archive now stretches back 17 years to 1999 covering 3.15 million recorded injury collisions.

Finally another first, the inclusion of the recorded description of collision circumstances.  In a pilot made possibly by the supply of data from Essex County Council, the initial descriptions are now included for collisions between 2011 and 2015 in Essex.  This text is often in abbreviated form and is usually recorded immediately following the collision. This statement is merely the opinion of the officer recording the details of the collision and does not reflect the result of an in-depth collision investigation.  Nevertheless it will be valuable to those wanting to know more about an individual collision and is something the founders of CrashMap would like to see expand to the rest of the country.

See Crashmap here.