Reported road casualties in Great Britain: main results 2018

27 July 2019

Statistics on reported road casualties in Great Britain for 2018 show that there were:

• 1,782 reported road deaths, similar to the level seen since 2012
• 160,378 casualties of all severities in reported road traffic accidents, a decrease of 6% compared to 2017

This year was the lowest number of casualties ever reported following a downward trend with a pretty straight-line since 2000. A more comprehensive analysis of 2018 casualty statistics will be published later this year in Reported Road Casualties Great Britain, annual report.

In its published report UK DfT highlights that the trend in the number of fatalities has been broadly fat since 2010 . Previously, and particularly between 2006 and 2010, the general trend was for fatalities to fall. Since that point, most of the year on year changes are either explained by one-off causes (for instance, the snow in 2010) or natural variation. The evidence points towards Britain being in a period when the fatality numbers are stable and most of the changes relate to random variation. The number of fatalities in 2018 was 1% less compared to 1,793 fatalities in 2017.

Full details are available here.

Further valuable comment from Road Safety Analysis is well worth reading here.