£72M COST OF CRASH INJURIES IN A YEAR
536 incidents on our roads in 2019 worked out as £134,000 per casualty:
Casualties on Sunderland’s roads cost the city around £72million in just one year, according to figures revealed to councillors this week.
Between January and December 2019, a total of 536 ‘road user casualties’ were reported on Wearside.
This included around 10 fatalities, 101 serious incidents and 425 slight incidents over the period.
The figures were recorded by Northumbria Police and cover collisions and accidents that involved personal injury to someone.
While road user casualties have increased by 1.5% compared to 2018 (528), the data over a 10-year period suggests that there is a ‘downward trend’ in the number of overall casualties on Sunderland’s roads.
The figures and further analysis on the ‘economic cost of casualties’ were included in a road safety report prepared for Sunderland City Council’s Economic Prosperity Scrutiny Committee.
According to the annual report, the 2019 data gives an average economic cost of £134,000 per casualty, which is higher than national and regional rates.
“The key thing to say about the 536 incidents that we have had on our roads is we have very few hotspots in the city,” said transport development manager for the council, Paul Lewins.
“A lot of this I believe has been down to the engineering work that the council has done to address areas of concern, which have been mainly junctions and we made improvements there to reduce the severity of related incidents occurring.”
Councillors heard that road casualty data helped to highlight specific areas of road safety work and groups that needed to be targeted in upcoming publicity campaigns.
Mr Lewins added: “What we need to be doing now is looking further afield to see what the trends of these 536 incidents are.
“For this year this is why we’re targeting pedestrians and the elderly which we see as key to getting those figures down.”
The annual report presented to the panel included an overview of road safety services, partnership work schemes and campaigns running across the city.
This included the ‘heads up bozo’ campaign which saw stickers and branding placed at crossings, footways and pedestrian areas to help prevent people being distracted by phone content while walking near traffic.
Council boss es also revealed plans for‘ priority ranking assessments’ which aim to focus more resources into community-related traffic issues.
Cllr Heather Fagan welcomed the move, adding she had faced difficulties under the current system.
“When you know and residents can tell you that there’s speeding happening on a particular road and we report it and say can we get some traffic monitoring in to prove this point, the answer tends to be ‘there’s been no accidents on that road in the last three years so no.’”
She added: “When you can see that it’s an accident waiting to happen, it just seems a bit of a daft way to do it, waiting for an accident to happen before we can get something done.”
Mr Le wins responded: “That has been the case in the past, this is why we’re trying to come up with this new methodology of doing that.”