It is our vision that every route and every mode of road travel should be available to everybody, free from the risk or fear of harm. We aim to utilise data to reduce casualties and increase road safety through educational programs and providing intelligence to help shape the safety policies of partner agencies.
What We Do
We undertake our statutory duty to investigate collisions; the Road Safety Act 1988 placed a duty on local highway authorities to “prepare and carry out a programme of measures designed to promote road safety”. Our road casualty statistics dashboard-style reports form part of our responsibility to study the occurrence of collisions and reveals the where, when, who and why behind the collision data collected by the Police.
The road casualty data we use is collected from Devon & Cornwall Police and we undertake data cleansing using Department for Transport (DfT) guidelines. More on collection/release of data.
We produce various detailed collision and casualty dashboard-style reports for specific road user groups and geographical areas, such as councillor area profiles.
We provide intelligence on specific routes and locations with higher concentrations of collisions, for example A & B road route analysis as shown in a dashboard below. This is essential in shaping priorities inside and outside of the Road Safety team – including Transport Planning (for the Local Transport Plan), Highways Maintenance, Highways Development Management and Public Health.
Use collision data to build evidence-led education programs tailored to groups of various road users e.g. driving courses for younger and older drivers, motorcyclists and business drivers These programs are produced in conjunction with partner agencies through the Vision Zero South West Road Safety Partnership.
We’ve worked with the Vision Zero South West Partnership to identify High Harm Routes. This covers the A and B road network across the whole of Devon and Cornwall area. The scoring of each route segment is collision density based. It’s calculated by dividing the number of collisions by the route length, and also includes a severity weighting for fatal and serious injury collisions. More on the methodology of the route scoring and ranking here.
The results of the Vision Zero High Harm Routes analysis for the Devon County Council area A and B roads can be found in the map dashboard below. Each route segment is displayed with a colour legend according to the collision performance score. Red routes are those in the worst performing quintile (top fifth) of all A and B road route segments across the whole of the Devon and Cornwall area. Zoom in and click on a route in the map to display statistics on the collisions that occurred within the route segment.
Data Publication Timescales
Our data release key milestones are interlinked with the Department for Transport (DfT) timelines. Typically each years data is released June each year at which point it has been fully collected, checked and validated by the DfT. We then process the data into dashboards and release an updates usually in June and July.
We take accessibility seriously and have incorporated accessibility functionality to our power BI dashboard style reports to allow content to be as accessible as possible. If you find some of the information not accessible, need guidance or an alternative format email collisiondata@devon.gov.uk with details of any preferred format and the assistive technology you use.
