Scottish Government

2. Background

2.1 This bulletin presents provisional statistics of reported injury road accidents (i.e. road accidents in which one or more people were killed or injured) in Scotland in 2010. These figures were extracted from the Transport Scotland's reported road accident statistical database on 13 May 2011. Final 2010 figures will appear in Reported Road Casualties Scotland 2010 and may differ slightly due to late returns and amendments. For similar reasons, the figures given here for 2009 and earlier years may differ slightly from those published previously.

2.2 The statistics are the numbers of injury road accidents which were reported by the police. Each accident is classified according to the severity of its most seriously injured casualty. Very few, if any, fatal accidents do not become known to the police. However, there could be many non-fatal injury accidents which are not reported by the public to the police, and are therefore not counted in these statistics because the police can only report accidents of which they are aware. Transport Scotland are looking at alternative data sources to estimate the levels of under reporting.

2.3 The casualty reduction targets for 2010 are described in section 10.4. Progress towards them is covered in section 8, tables 5 to 7 and the charts here. The Scottish Road Safety Framework published on 15 June 2009, outlined Scottish specific 2020 targets. These will be adopted after the lifetime of the current targets.

2.4 Key 2010 Reported Road Casualty Statistics is one of a series of Transport Statistics publications, most of which focus on particular aspects of transport and cover them in depth. A comprehensive statistical picture of transport activity is given in the compendium Scottish Transport Statistics volume, the Main Transport Trends bulletin and the Key Transport Statistics card. Key 2010 Reported Road Casualty Statistics is followed in October by Reported Road Casualties Scotland, a volume which includes extensive analyses of the numbers of accidents, vehicles and casualties.

www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Transport-Travel/Publications

2.5 We welcome comments and feedback on these statistics.

Prepared for publication by:

Matt Perkins
Andrew Knight
Charlie Lewis

Telephone 0131 244 7256

transtat@transportscotland.gsi.gov.uk