Introducing stats19

Introduction

stats19 enables access to and processing of Great Britain’s official road traffic casualty database, STATS19. A description of variables in the database can be found in a guidance provided by the UK’s Department for Transport (DfT). The datasets are collectively called STATS19 after the form used to report them, which can be found here. This vignette focuses on how to use the stats19 package to work with STATS19 data.

Note: The Department for Transport used to refer to ‘accidents’, but “crashes” may be a more appropriate term, as emphasised in the “crash not accident” arguments of road safety advocacy groups such as RoadPeace. We use the term collision only in reference to nomenclature within the data as provided.

The development version is hosted on GitHub and can be installed and loaded as follows:

# from CRAN
install.packages("stats19")
# you can install the latest development (discoraged) using:
remotes::install_github("ITSLeeds/stats19")

library(stats19)
#> Data provided under OGL v3.0. Cite the source and link to:
#> www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Functions

The easiest way to get STATS19 data is with get_stats19(). This function takes 2 main arguments, year and type. The year can be any year between 1979 and 202x where x is the current year minus one or two due to the delay in publishing STATS19 statistics. The type can be one of accidents, casualties and vehicles, described below. get_stats19() performs 3 jobs, corresponding to three main types of functions:

Download: A dl_stats19() function accepts year, type and filename arguments to make it easy to find the right file to download only.
Read: STATS19 data is provided in a particular format that benefits from being read-in with pre-specified column types. This is taken care of with read_*() functions providing access to the 3 main tables in STATS19 data:
- read_collisions() reads-in the crash data (which has one row per incident)
- read_casualties() reads-in the casualty data (which has one row per person injured or killed)
- read_vehicles() reads-in the vehicles table, which contains information on the vehicles involved in the crashes (and has one row per vehicle)
Format: There are corresponding format_*() functions for each of the read_*() functions. These have been exported for convenience, as the two sets of functions are closely related, there is also a format parameter for the read_*() functions, which by default is TRUE, adds labels to the tables. The raw data provided by the DfT contains only integers. Running read_*(..., format = TRUE) converts these integer values to the corresponding character variables for each of the three tables. For example, read_collisions(format = TRUE) converts values in the accident_severity column from 1, 2 and 3 to Slight, Serious and Fatal using fromat_collisions() function. To read-in raw data without formatting, set format = FALSE.

Multiple functions (read_* and format_*) are needed for each step because of the structure of STATS19 data, which are divided into 3 tables:

“accident circumstances, with details about location, severity, weather, etc.;
casualties, referencing knowledge about the victims; and
vehicles, which contains more information about the vehicle type and manoeuvres, as well the some information about the driver.”

Data files containing multiple years worth of data can be downloaded. Datasets since 1979 are broadly consistent, meaning that STATS19 data represents a rich historic geographic record of road casualties at a national level.

Download STATS19 data

stats19 enables download of raw STATS19 data with dl_* functions. The following code chunk, for example, downloads and unzips a .zip file containing STATS19 data from 2022:

dl_stats19(year = 2022, type = "collision", ask = FALSE)
#> Files identified: dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
#>    https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
#> Attempt downloading from: https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
#> Data saved at /tmp/RtmpxY1HKW/dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
#> NULL

Note that in the previous command, ask = FALSE, meaning you will not be asked. By default you are asked to confirm, before downloading large files. Currently, these files are downloaded to a default location of tempdir which is a platform independent “safe” but temporary location to download the data in. Once downloaded, they are unzipped under original DfT file names. The dl_stats19() function prints out the location and final file name(s) of unzipped files(s) as shown above.

dl_stats19() takes three parameters. Supplying a file_name is interpreted to mean that the user is aware of what to download and the other two parameters will be ignored. You can also use year and type to “search” through the file names, which are stored in a lazy-loaded dataset called stats19::file_names.

You can find out the names of files that can be downloaded with names(stats19::file_names), an example of which is shown below:

stats19::file_names$DigitalBreathTestData2013.zip
#> NULL

To see how file_names was created, see ?file_names. Data files from other years can be selected interactively. Just providing a year, for example, presents the user with multiple options (from file_names), illustrated below:

dl_stats19(year = 2022)

Multiple matches. Which do you want to download?

1: dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
2: dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
3: dft-road-casualty-statistics-accident-2022.csv

Selection: 
Enter an item from the menu, or 0 to exit

When R is running interactively, you can select which of the 3 matching files to download: those relating to vehicles, casualties or accidents in 2022.

Read STATS19 data

In a similar approach to the download section before, we can read files downloaded using a data_dir location of the file and the filename to read. The code below will download the dftRoadSafetyData_Accidents_2022.zip file from the DfT servers and read its content. Files are saved by default in tempdir(), but this can be overridden to ensure permanent storage in a user-defined location.

crashes_2022_raw = get_stats19(year = 2022, type = "collision", format = FALSE)
#> Files identified: dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
#>    https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
#> Data already exists in data_dir, not downloading
#> Reading in:
#> /tmp/RtmpxY1HKW/dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv

stats19 imports data with readr::read_csv() which results in a ‘tibble’ object: a data frame with more user-friendly printing and a few other features.

class(crashes_2022_raw)
#> [1] "spec_tbl_df" "tbl_df"      "tbl"         "data.frame"
dim(crashes_2022_raw)
#> [1] 106004     37

There are three read_*() functions, corresponding to the three different classes of data provided by the DfT: 1. read_collisions() 2. read_casualties() 3. read_vehicles()

In all cases, a default parameter read_*(format = TRUE) returns the data in formatted form, as described above. Data can also be imported in the form directly provided by the DfT by passing format = FALSE, and then subsequently formatted with additional format_*() functions, as described in a final section of this vignette. Each of these read_*() functions is now described in more detail.

Crash data

After raw data files have been downloaded as described in the previous section, they can then be read-in as follows:

crashes_2022_raw = read_collisions(year = 2022, format = FALSE)
#> Reading in:
#> /tmp/RtmpxY1HKW/dft-road-casualty-statistics-collision-2022.csv
crashes_2022 = format_collisions(crashes_2022_raw)
#> date and time columns present, creating formatted datetime column
#> Warning in format_stats19(x, type = "Accident"): NAs introduced by coercion
#> Warning in format_stats19(x, type = "Accident"): NAs introduced by coercion
#> Warning in format_stats19(x, type = "Accident"): NAs introduced by coercion
nrow(crashes_2022_raw)
#> [1] 106004
ncol(crashes_2022_raw)
#> [1] 37
nrow(crashes_2022)
#> [1] 106004
ncol(crashes_2022)
#> [1] 38

What just happened? We read-in data on all road crashes recorded by the police in 2022 across Great Britain. The dataset contains

32 columns (variables) for

129,982 crashes.

This work was done by read_collisions(format = FALSE), which imported the “raw” STATS19 data without cleaning messy column names or re-categorising the outputs. format_collisions() function automates the process of matching column names with variable names provided by the DfT. This means crashes_2022 is much more usable than crashes_2022_raw, as shown below, which shows some key variables in the messy and clean datasets:

crashes_2022_raw[c(7, 18, 23, 25)]
#> # A tibble: 106,004 × 4
#>    latitude first_road_class junction_control second_road_number
#>       <dbl> <chr>            <chr>            <chr>             
#>  1     51.5 3                4                0                 
#>  2     51.5 3                2                0                 
#>  3     51.5 3                4                0                 
#>  4     51.6 6                -1               -1                
#>  5     51.6 3                4                0                 
#>  6     51.5 3                4                0                 
#>  7     51.4 6                4                0                 
#>  8     51.6 3                -1               -1                
#>  9     51.5 3                2                0                 
#> 10     51.6 4                4                0                 
#> # ℹ 105,994 more rows
crashes_2022[c(7, 18, 23, 25)]
#> # A tibble: 106,004 × 4
#>    latitude first_road_class junction_control             second_road_number    
#>       <dbl> <chr>            <chr>                        <chr>                 
#>  1     51.5 A                Give way or uncontrolled     first_road_class is C…
#>  2     51.5 A                Auto traffic signal          first_road_class is C…
#>  3     51.5 A                Give way or uncontrolled     first_road_class is C…
#>  4     51.6 Unclassified     Data missing or out of range Unknown               
#>  5     51.6 A                Give way or uncontrolled     first_road_class is C…
#>  6     51.5 A                Give way or uncontrolled     first_road_class is C…
#>  7     51.4 Unclassified     Give way or uncontrolled     first_road_class is C…
#>  8     51.6 A                Data missing or out of range Unknown               
#>  9     51.5 A                Auto traffic signal          first_road_class is C…
#> 10     51.6 B                Give way or uncontrolled     first_road_class is C…
#> # ℹ 105,994 more rows

By default, format = TRUE, meaning that the two stages of read_collisions(format = FALSE) and format_collisions() yield the same result as read_collisions(format = TRUE). For the full list of columns, run names(crashes_2022).

Note: As indicated above, the term collision is only used as directly provided by the DfT; “crashes” is a more appropriate term, hence we call our resultant datasets crashes_*.

Format STATS19 data

It is also possible to import the “raw” data as provided by the DfT. The packaged datasets stats19_variables and stats19_schema provide summary information about the contents of this data guide. These contain the full variable names in the guide (stats19_variables) and a complete look up table relating integer values to the .csv files provided by the DfT and their labels (stats19_schema). The first rows of each dataset are shown below:

stats19_variables
#> # A tibble: 98 × 5
#> # Groups:   table [4]
#>    table    variable                                    note   column_name type 
#>    <chr>    <chr>                                       <chr>  <chr>       <chr>
#>  1 Accident accident_index                              uniqu… accident_i… char…
#>  2 Accident accident_index                              uniqu… accident_i… char…
#>  3 Accident accident_index                              uniqu… accident_i… char…
#>  4 Accident accident_reference                          In ye… accident_r… char…
#>  5 Accident accident_severity                           <NA>   accident_s… char…
#>  6 Accident accident_year                               <NA>   accident_y… nume…
#>  7 Accident carriageway_hazards                         <NA>   carriagewa… char…
#>  8 Accident date                                        <NA>   date        char…
#>  9 Accident day_of_week                                 <NA>   day_of_week char…
#> 10 Accident did_police_officer_attend_scene_of_accident <NA>   did_police… char…
#> # ℹ 88 more rows
stats19_schema
#> # A tibble: 914 × 7
#>    table    variable     code  label              note  variable_formatted type 
#>    <chr>    <chr>        <chr> <chr>              <chr> <chr>              <chr>
#>  1 Accident police_force 1     Metropolitan Poli… <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  2 Accident police_force 3     Cumbria            <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  3 Accident police_force 4     Lancashire         <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  4 Accident police_force 5     Merseyside         <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  5 Accident police_force 6     Greater Manchester <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  6 Accident police_force 7     Cheshire           <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  7 Accident police_force 10    Northumbria        <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  8 Accident police_force 11    Durham             <NA>  police_force       char…
#>  9 Accident police_force 12    North Yorkshire    <NA>  police_force       char…
#> 10 Accident police_force 13    West Yorkshire     <NA>  police_force       char…
#> # ℹ 904 more rows

The code that generated these small datasets can be found in their help pages (accessed with ?stats19_variables and ?stats19_schema respectively). stats19_schema is used internally to automate the process of formatting the downloaded .csv files. Column names are formatted by the function format_column_names(), as illustrated below:

format_column_names(stats19_variables$variable[1:3])
#> [1] "accident_index" "accident_index" "accident_index"

Previous approaches to data formatting STATS19 data involved hard-coding results. This more automated approach to data cleaning is more consistent and fail-safe. The three functions: format_collisions(), format_vehicles() and format_casualties() do the data formatting on the respective data frames, as illustrated below:

crashes_2022 = format_collisions(crashes_2022_raw)
#> date and time columns present, creating formatted datetime column
#> Warning in format_stats19(x, type = "Accident"): NAs introduced by coercion
#> Warning in format_stats19(x, type = "Accident"): NAs introduced by coercion
#> Warning in format_stats19(x, type = "Accident"): NAs introduced by coercion

# vehicle data for 2022
dl_stats19(year = 2022, type = "vehicle", ask = FALSE)
#> Files identified: dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
#>    https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
#> Attempt downloading from: https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
#> Data saved at /tmp/RtmpxY1HKW/dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
#> NULL
vehicles_2022_raw = read_vehicles(year = 2022)
#> Warning: The following named parsers don't match the column names:
#> accident_severity, carriageway_hazards, date, day_of_week,
#> did_police_officer_attend_scene_of_accident, first_road_class,
#> first_road_number, junction_control, junction_detail, Latitude,
#> light_conditions, local_authority_district, local_authority_highway,
#> local_authority_ons_district, location_easting_osgr, location_northing_osgr,
#> longitude, lsoa_of_accident_location, number_of_casualties, number_of_vehicles,
#> pedestrian_crossing_human_control, pedestrian_crossing_physical_facilities,
#> police_force, road_surface_conditions, road_type, second_road_class,
#> second_road_number, special_conditions_at_site, speed_limit, time,
#> trunk_road_flag, urban_or_rural_area, weather_conditions, age_band_of_casualty,
#> age_of_casualty, bus_or_coach_passenger, car_passenger, casualty_class,
#> casualty_home_area_type, casualty_imd_decile, casualty_reference,
#> casualty_severity, casualty_type, pedestrian_location, pedestrian_movement,
#> pedestrian_road_maintenance_worker, sex_of_casualty, vehicle_text
#> Warning in asMethod(object): NAs introduced by coercion
vehicles_2022 = format_vehicles(vehicles_2022_raw)

# casualties data for 2022
dl_stats19(year = 2022, type = "casualty", ask = FALSE)
#> Files identified: dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
#>    https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
#> Attempt downloading from: https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
#> Data saved at /tmp/RtmpxY1HKW/dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
#> NULL
casualties_2022 = read_casualties(year = 2022)
#> Warning: The following named parsers don't match the column names: accident_severity, carriageway_hazards, date, day_of_week, did_police_officer_attend_scene_of_accident, first_road_class, first_road_number, junction_control, junction_detail, Latitude, light_conditions, local_authority_district, local_authority_highway, local_authority_ons_district, location_easting_osgr, location_northing_osgr, longitude, lsoa_of_accident_location, number_of_casualties, number_of_vehicles, pedestrian_crossing_human_control, pedestrian_crossing_physical_facilities, police_force, road_surface_conditions, road_type, second_road_class, second_road_number, special_conditions_at_site, speed_limit, time, trunk_road_flag, urban_or_rural_area, weather_conditions, vehicle_text, vehicle_type, age_band_of_driver, age_of_driver, age_of_vehicle, driver_home_area_type, driver_imd_decile, engine_capacity_cc, first_point_of_impact, generic_make_model, hit_object_in_carriageway, hit_object_off_carriageway, journey_purpose_of_driver, junction_location, propulsion_code, sex_of_driver, skidding_and_overturning, towing_and_articulation, vehicle_direction_from, vehicle_direction_to, vehicle_leaving_carriageway, vehicle_left_hand_drive, vehicle_location_restricted_lane, vehicle_manoeuvre
#> NAs introduced by coercion

The package automates this two-step read_* and format_* process by defaulting in all cases to data_year = read_*(year, format = TRUE). read_* functions return, by default, formatted data. The two-step process may nevertheless be important for reference to the official nomenclature and values as provided by the DfT.

A summary of the outputs for each of the three tables is shown below.

summarise_stats19 = function(x) {
  data.frame(row.names = 1:length(x),
    name = substr(names(x), 1, 19),
    class = sapply(x, function(v) class(v)[1]),
    n_unique = sapply(x, function(v) length(unique(v))),
    first_label = sapply(x, function(v) substr(unique(v)[1], 1, 16)),
    most_common_value = sapply(x, function(v) 
      substr(names(sort(table(v), decreasing = TRUE)[1]), 1, 16)[1])
  )
}

knitr::kable(summarise_stats19(crashes_2022), 
             caption = "Summary of formatted crash data.")

Summary of formatted crash data.
name	class	n_unique	first_label	most_common_value
accident_index	character	106004	2022010352073	2022010352073
accident_year	integer	1	2022	2022
accident_reference	character	106004	010352073	010352073
location_easting_os	numeric	85481	525199	533653
location_northing_o	numeric	85711	177928	180088
longitude	numeric	103897	-0.198224	-3.099017
latitude	numeric	102680	51.486454	51.442218
police_force	character	44	Metropolitan Pol	Metropolitan Pol
accident_severity	character	3	Slight	Slight
number_of_vehicles	character	14	2	2
number_of_casualtie	character	16	1	1
date	Date	365	2022-01-05	2022-11-04
day_of_week	character	7	Wednesday	Friday
time	character	1440	16:40	17:00
local_authority_dis	character	1	-1	-1
local_authority_ons	character	364	E09000013	E08000025
local_authority_hig	character	207	E09000013	E10000016
first_road_class	character	6	A	A
first_road_number	character	3110	3218	first_road_class
road_type	character	6	Single carriagew	Single carriagew
speed_limit	character	6	30	30
junction_detail	character	10	Crossroads	Not at junction
junction_control	character	6	Give way or unco	Give way or unco
second_road_class	character	8	Unclassified	Not at junction
second_road_number	character	2364	first_road_class	first_road_class
pedestrian_crossing	character	5	None within 50 m	None within 50 m
pedestrian_crossing	character	8	No physical cros	No physical cros
light_conditions	character	6	Darkness - light	Daylight
weather_conditions	character	9	Fine no high win	Fine no high win
road_surface_condit	character	7	Dry	Dry
special_conditions_	character	10	None	None
carriageway_hazards	character	8	None	None
urban_or_rural_area	character	3	Urban	Urban
did_police_officer_	character	3	Yes	Yes
trunk_road_flag	character	3	Non-trunk	Non-trunk
lsoa_of_accident_lo	character	26849	E01001883	-1
enhanced_severity_c	numeric	6	-1	-1
datetime	POSIXct	79890	2022-01-05 16:40	2022-07-14 18:00

knitr::kable(summarise_stats19(vehicles_2022), 
             caption = "Summary of formatted vehicles data.")

Summary of formatted vehicles data.
name	class	n_unique	first_label	most_common_value
accident_index	character	106004	2022010352073	2022371220504
accident_year	integer	1	2022	2022
accident_reference	character	106004	010352073	371220504
vehicle_reference	character	24	1	1
vehicle_type	character	22	Van / Goods 3.5	Car
towing_and_articula	character	8	No tow/articulat	No tow/articulat
vehicle_manoeuvre	character	20	Turning right	Going ahead othe
vehicle_direction_f	character	10	East	South East
vehicle_direction_t	character	10	North West	South East
vehicle_location_re	character	12	On main c’way -	On main c’way -
junction_location	character	11	Approaching junc	Not at or within
skidding_and_overtu	character	8	None	None
hit_object_in_carri	character	14	None	None
vehicle_leaving_car	character	11	Did not leave ca	Did not leave ca
hit_object_off_carr	character	14	None	None
first_point_of_impa	character	7	Front	Front
vehicle_left_hand_d	character	3	Yes	No
journey_purpose_of_	character	6	Commuting to/fro	Not known
sex_of_driver	character	3	Male	Male
age_of_driver	integer	99	48	30
age_band_of_driver	character	12	46 - 55	26 - 35
engine_capacity_cc	character	1015	1461	Data missing or
propulsion_code	character	10	Heavy oil	Petrol
age_of_vehicle	integer	86	4	-1
generic_make_model	character	701	RENAULT KANGOO	Data missing or
driver_imd_decile	character	11	Less deprived 30	Data missing or
driver_home_area_ty	character	4	Urban area	Urban area
lsoa_of_driver	character	32838	E01002687	-1
escooter_flag	numeric	2	0	0
dir_from_e	character	17574	NULL	NULL
dir_from_n	character	17410	NULL	NULL
dir_to_e	character	17359	NULL	NULL
dir_to_n	character	17154	NULL	NULL
driver_distance_ban	numeric	6	1	1

knitr::kable(summarise_stats19(casualties_2022), 
             caption = "Summary of formatted casualty data.")

Summary of formatted casualty data.
name	class	n_unique	first_label	most_common_value
accident_index	character	106004	2022010352073	2022010356595
accident_year	integer	1	2022	2022
accident_reference	character	106004	010352073	010356595
vehicle_reference	character	17	2	1
casualty_reference	character	19	1	1
casualty_class	character	3	Driver or rider	Driver or rider
sex_of_casualty	character	4	Male	Male
age_of_casualty	integer	103	17	18
age_band_of_casualt	character	12	16 - 20	26 - 35
casualty_severity	character	3	Slight	Slight
pedestrian_location	character	12	Not a Pedestrian	Not a Pedestrian
pedestrian_movement	character	11	Not a Pedestrian	Not a Pedestrian
car_passenger	character	5	Not car passenge	Not car passenge
bus_or_coach_passen	character	7	Not a bus or coa	Not a bus or coa
pedestrian_road_mai	character	4	No / Not applica	No / Not applica
casualty_type	character	23	Motorcycle 125cc	Car occupant
casualty_home_area_	character	4	Urban area	Urban area
casualty_imd_decile	character	11	Most deprived 10	More deprived 10
lsoa_of_casualty	character	31105	E01001364	-1
enhanced_casualty_s	numeric	6	-1	-1
casualty_distance_b	numeric	6	3	1

For testing and other purposes, a sample from the accidents table is provided in the package. A few columns from the two-row sample is shown below:

accident_severity	speed_limit	pedestrian_crossing_human_control	light_conditions
Serious	30	Control by other authorised person	Daylight
Slight	30	None within 50 metres	Darkness - no lighting
Slight	30	None within 50 metres	Daylight

Casualties data

As with crashes_2022, casualty data for 2022 can be downloaded, read-in and formatted as follows:

dl_stats19(year = 2022, type = "casualty", ask = FALSE)
#> Files identified: dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
#>    https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-casualty-2022.csv
#> Data already exists in data_dir, not downloading
casualties_2022 = read_casualties(year = 2022)
#> Warning: The following named parsers don't match the column names:
#> accident_severity, carriageway_hazards, date, day_of_week,
#> did_police_officer_attend_scene_of_accident, first_road_class,
#> first_road_number, junction_control, junction_detail, Latitude,
#> light_conditions, local_authority_district, local_authority_highway,
#> local_authority_ons_district, location_easting_osgr, location_northing_osgr,
#> longitude, lsoa_of_accident_location, number_of_casualties, number_of_vehicles,
#> pedestrian_crossing_human_control, pedestrian_crossing_physical_facilities,
#> police_force, road_surface_conditions, road_type, second_road_class,
#> second_road_number, special_conditions_at_site, speed_limit, time,
#> trunk_road_flag, urban_or_rural_area, weather_conditions, vehicle_text,
#> vehicle_type, age_band_of_driver, age_of_driver, age_of_vehicle,
#> driver_home_area_type, driver_imd_decile, engine_capacity_cc,
#> first_point_of_impact, generic_make_model, hit_object_in_carriageway,
#> hit_object_off_carriageway, journey_purpose_of_driver, junction_location,
#> propulsion_code, sex_of_driver, skidding_and_overturning,
#> towing_and_articulation, vehicle_direction_from, vehicle_direction_to,
#> vehicle_leaving_carriageway, vehicle_left_hand_drive,
#> vehicle_location_restricted_lane, vehicle_manoeuvre
#> Warning in asMethod(object): NAs introduced by coercion
nrow(casualties_2022)
#> [1] 135480
ncol(casualties_2022)
#> [1] 21

The results show that there were

170,993 casualties reported by the police in the STATS19 dataset in 2022, and

16 columns (variables). Values for a sample of these columns are shown below:

casualties_2022[c(4, 5, 6, 14)]
#> # A tibble: 135,480 × 4
#>    vehicle_reference casualty_reference casualty_class  bus_or_coach_passenger  
#>    <chr>             <chr>              <chr>           <chr>                   
#>  1 2                 1                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  2 1                 1                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  3 1                 1                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  4 1                 1                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  5 1                 2                  Passenger       Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  6 1                 1                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  7 2                 2                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  8 3                 3                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#>  9 1                 1                  Driver or rider Not a bus or coach pass…
#> 10 1                 2                  Passenger       Not a bus or coach pass…
#> # ℹ 135,470 more rows

The full list of column names in the casualties dataset is:

names(casualties_2022)
#>  [1] "accident_index"                     "accident_year"                     
#>  [3] "accident_reference"                 "vehicle_reference"                 
#>  [5] "casualty_reference"                 "casualty_class"                    
#>  [7] "sex_of_casualty"                    "age_of_casualty"                   
#>  [9] "age_band_of_casualty"               "casualty_severity"                 
#> [11] "pedestrian_location"                "pedestrian_movement"               
#> [13] "car_passenger"                      "bus_or_coach_passenger"            
#> [15] "pedestrian_road_maintenance_worker" "casualty_type"                     
#> [17] "casualty_home_area_type"            "casualty_imd_decile"               
#> [19] "lsoa_of_casualty"                   "enhanced_casualty_severity"        
#> [21] "casualty_distance_banding"

Vehicles data

Data for vehicles involved in crashes in 2022 can be downloaded, read-in and formatted as follows:

dl_stats19(year = 2022, type = "vehicle", ask = FALSE)
#> Files identified: dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
#>    https://data.dft.gov.uk/road-accidents-safety-data/dft-road-casualty-statistics-vehicle-2022.csv
#> Data already exists in data_dir, not downloading
vehicles_2022 = read_vehicles(year = 2022)
#> Warning: The following named parsers don't match the column names:
#> accident_severity, carriageway_hazards, date, day_of_week,
#> did_police_officer_attend_scene_of_accident, first_road_class,
#> first_road_number, junction_control, junction_detail, Latitude,
#> light_conditions, local_authority_district, local_authority_highway,
#> local_authority_ons_district, location_easting_osgr, location_northing_osgr,
#> longitude, lsoa_of_accident_location, number_of_casualties, number_of_vehicles,
#> pedestrian_crossing_human_control, pedestrian_crossing_physical_facilities,
#> police_force, road_surface_conditions, road_type, second_road_class,
#> second_road_number, special_conditions_at_site, speed_limit, time,
#> trunk_road_flag, urban_or_rural_area, weather_conditions, age_band_of_casualty,
#> age_of_casualty, bus_or_coach_passenger, car_passenger, casualty_class,
#> casualty_home_area_type, casualty_imd_decile, casualty_reference,
#> casualty_severity, casualty_type, pedestrian_location, pedestrian_movement,
#> pedestrian_road_maintenance_worker, sex_of_casualty, vehicle_text
#> Warning in asMethod(object): NAs introduced by coercion
nrow(vehicles_2022)
#> [1] 193545
ncol(vehicles_2022)
#> [1] 34

The results show that there were

238,926 vehicles involved in crashes reported by the police in the STATS19 dataset in 2022, with

23 columns (variables). Values for a sample of these columns are shown below:

vehicles_2022[c(3, 14:16)]
#> # A tibble: 193,545 × 4
#>    accident_reference vehicle_leaving_carriageway hit_object_off_carriageway 
#>    <chr>              <chr>                       <chr>                      
#>  1 010352073          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  2 010352073          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  3 010352573          Nearside                    Road sign or traffic signal
#>  4 010352573          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  5 010352575          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  6 010352575          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  7 010352578          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  8 010352578          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#>  9 010352580          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#> 10 010352580          Did not leave carriageway   None                       
#> # ℹ 193,535 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: first_point_of_impact <chr>

The full list of column names in the vehicles dataset is:

names(vehicles_2022)
#>  [1] "accident_index"                   "accident_year"                   
#>  [3] "accident_reference"               "vehicle_reference"               
#>  [5] "vehicle_type"                     "towing_and_articulation"         
#>  [7] "vehicle_manoeuvre"                "vehicle_direction_from"          
#>  [9] "vehicle_direction_to"             "vehicle_location_restricted_lane"
#> [11] "junction_location"                "skidding_and_overturning"        
#> [13] "hit_object_in_carriageway"        "vehicle_leaving_carriageway"     
#> [15] "hit_object_off_carriageway"       "first_point_of_impact"           
#> [17] "vehicle_left_hand_drive"          "journey_purpose_of_driver"       
#> [19] "sex_of_driver"                    "age_of_driver"                   
#> [21] "age_band_of_driver"               "engine_capacity_cc"              
#> [23] "propulsion_code"                  "age_of_vehicle"                  
#> [25] "generic_make_model"               "driver_imd_decile"               
#> [27] "driver_home_area_type"            "lsoa_of_driver"                  
#> [29] "escooter_flag"                    "dir_from_e"                      
#> [31] "dir_from_n"                       "dir_to_e"                        
#> [33] "dir_to_n"                         "driver_distance_banding"

Creating geographic crash data

An important feature of STATS19 data is that the collision table contains geographic coordinates. These are provided at ~10m resolution in the UK’s official coordinate reference system (the Ordnance Survey National Grid, EPSG code 27700). stats19 converts the non-geographic tables created by format_collisions() into the geographic data form of the sf package with the function format_sf() as follows:

crashes_sf = format_sf(crashes_2022)
#> 22 rows removed with no coordinates

The note arises because NA values are not permitted in sf coordinates, and so rows containing no coordinates are automatically removed. Having the data in a standard geographic form allows various geographic operations to be performed on it. Spatial operations, such as spatial subsetting and spatial aggregation, can be performed, to show the relationship between STATS19 data and other geographic objects, such as roads, schools and administrative zones.

An example of an administrative zone dataset of relevance to STATS19 data is the boundaries of police forces in England, which is provided in the packaged dataset police_boundaries. The following code chunk demonstrates the kind of spatial operations that can be performed on geographic STATS19 data, by counting and plotting the number of fatalities per police force:

library(sf)
library(dplyr)
crashes_sf %>% 
  filter(accident_severity == "Fatal") %>% 
  select(n_fatalities = accident_index) %>% 
  aggregate(by = police_boundaries, FUN = length) %>% 
  plot()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()

Of course, one should not draw conclusions from such analyses without care. In this case, denominators are needed to infer anything about road safety in any of the police regions. After suitable denominators have been included, performance metrics such as ‘health risk’ (fatalities per 100,000 people), ‘traffic risk’ (fatalities per billion km, f/bkm) and ‘exposure risk’ (fatalities per million hours, f/mh) can be calculated (Feleke et al. 2018; Elvik et al. 2009).

The following code chunk, for example, returns all crashes within the jurisdiction of West Yorkshire Police:

west_yorkshire =
  police_boundaries[police_boundaries$pfa16nm == "West Yorkshire", ]
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()

crashes_wy = crashes_sf[west_yorkshire, ]
nrow(crashes_sf)
#> [1] 105982
nrow(crashes_wy)
#> [1] 4400

This subsetting has selected the

4,371 crashes which occurred in West Yorkshire.

Joining tables

The three main tables we have just read-in can be joined by shared key variables. This is demonstrated in the code chunk below, which subsets all casualties that took place in West Yorkshire, and counts the number of casualties by severity for each crash:

library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)
sel = casualties_2022$accident_index %in% crashes_wy$accident_index
casualties_wy = casualties_2022[sel, ]
cas_types = casualties_wy %>% 
  select(accident_index, casualty_type) %>% 
  group_by(accident_index) %>% 
  summarise(
    Total = n(),
    walking = sum(casualty_type == "Pedestrian"),
    cycling = sum(casualty_type == "Cyclist"),
    passenger = sum(casualty_type == "Car occupant")
    ) 
cj = left_join(crashes_wy, cas_types)

What just happened? We found the subset of casualties that took place in West Yorkshire with reference to the accident_index variable. Then we used the dplyr function summarise(), to find the number of people who were in a car, cycling, and walking when they were injured. This new casualty dataset is joined onto the crashes_wy dataset. The result is a spatial (sf) data frame of crashes in West Yorkshire, with columns counting how many road users of different types were hurt. The joined data has additional variables:

base::setdiff(names(cj), names(crashes_wy))
#> [1] "Total"     "walking"   "cycling"   "passenger"

As a simple spatial plot, we can map all the crashes that have happened in West Yorkshire in 2022, with the colour related to the total number of people hurt in each crash. Placing this plot next to a map of West Yorkshire provides context:

plot(
  cj[cj$cycling > 0, "speed_limit", ],
  cex = cj$Total[cj$cycling > 0] / 3,
  main = "Speed limit (cycling)"
  )
plot(
  cj[cj$passenger > 0, "speed_limit", ],
  cex = cj$Total[cj$passenger > 0] / 3,
  main = "Speed limit (passenger)"
  )

The spatial distribution of crashes in West Yorkshire clearly relates to the region’s geography. Car crashes tend to happen on fast roads, including busy Motorway roads, displayed in yellow above. Cycling is as an urban activity, and the most bike crashes can be found in near Leeds city centre, which has a comparatively high level of cycling (compared with the low baseline of 3%). This can be seen by comparing the previous map with an overview of the area, from an academic paper on the social, spatial and temporal distribution of bike crashes (Lovelace, Roberts, and Kellar 2016):

In addition to the Total number of people hurt/killed, cj contains a column for each type of casualty (cyclist, car occupant, etc.), and a number corresponding to the number of each type hurt in each crash. It also contains the geometry column from crashes_sf. In other words, joins allow the casualties and vehicles tables to be geo-referenced. We can then explore the spatial distribution of different casualty types. The following figure, for example, shows the spatial distribution of pedestrians and car passengers hurt in car crashes across West Yorkshire in 2022:

library(ggplot2)
crashes_types = cj %>% 
  filter(accident_severity != "Slight") %>% 
  mutate(type = case_when(
    walking > 0 ~ "Walking",
    cycling > 0 ~ "Cycling",
    passenger > 0 ~ "Passenger",
    TRUE ~ "Other"
  ))
crashes_types$speed_limit = as.integer(crashes_types$speed_limit)
table(crashes_types$speed_limit)
#> 
#>  20  30  40  50  60  70 
#> 100 848 155  30  75  63
ggplot(crashes_types, aes(size = Total, colour = speed_limit)) +
  geom_sf(show.legend = "point", alpha = 0.3) +
  facet_grid(vars(type), vars(accident_severity)) +
  scale_size(
    breaks = c(1:3, 12),
    labels = c(1:2, "3+", 12)
    ) +
  scale_color_gradientn(colours = c("blue", "yellow", "red")) +
  theme(axis.text = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank())

Spatial distribution of serious and fatal crashes in West Yorkshire, for cycling, walking, being a car passenger and other modes of travel. Colour is related to the speed limit where the crash happened (red is faster) and size is proportional to the total number of people hurt in each crash (legend not shown).

It is clear that different types of road users tend to get hurt in different places. Car occupant casualties (labelled ‘passengers’ in the map above), for example, are comparatively common on the outskirts of cities such as Leeds, where speed limits tend to be higher and where there are comparatively higher volumes of motor traffic. Casualties to people on foot tend to happen in the city centres. That is not to say that cities centres are more dangerous per unit distance (typically casualties per billion kilometres, bkm, is the unit used) walked: there is more walking in city centres (you need a denominator to estimate risk).

To drill down further, we can find the spatial distribution of all pedestrian casualties, broken-down by seriousness of casualty, and light conditions. This can be done with tidyvers functions follows:

table(cj$light_conditions)
#> 
#> Darkness - lighting unknown       Darkness - lights lit 
#>                          81                        1136 
#>     Darkness - lights unlit      Darkness - no lighting 
#>                          40                         117 
#>                    Daylight 
#>                        3026
cj$speed_limit = as.integer(cj$speed_limit)
cj %>% 
  filter(walking > 0) %>% 
  mutate(light = case_when(
    light_conditions == "Daylight" ~ "Daylight",
    light_conditions == "Darkness - lights lit" ~ "Lit",
    TRUE ~ "Other/Unlit"
  )) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(colour = speed_limit)) +
  geom_sf() +
  facet_grid(vars(light), vars(accident_severity)) +
  scale_color_continuous(low = "blue", high = "red") +
  theme(axis.text = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank())

Time series analysis

We can also explore seasonal and daily trends in crashes by aggregating crashes by day of the year:

crashes_dates = cj %>% 
  st_set_geometry(NULL) %>% 
  group_by(date) %>% 
  summarise(
    walking = sum(walking),
    cycling = sum(cycling),
    passenger = sum(passenger)
    ) %>% 
  gather(mode, casualties, -date)
ggplot(crashes_dates, aes(date, casualties)) +
  geom_smooth(aes(colour = mode), method = "loess") +
  ylab("Casualties per day")
#> `geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'

Different types of crashes also tend to happen at different times of day. This is illustrated in the plot below, which shows the times of day when people who were travelling by different modes were most commonly injured.

library(stringr)

crash_times = cj %>% 
  st_set_geometry(NULL) %>% 
  group_by(hour = as.numeric(str_sub(time, 1, 2))) %>% 
  summarise(
    walking = sum(walking),
    cycling = sum(cycling),
    passenger = sum(passenger)
    ) %>% 
  gather(mode, casualties, -hour)

ggplot(crash_times, aes(hour, casualties)) +
  geom_line(aes(colour = mode))

Note that bike crashes tend to have distinct morning and afternoon peaks, in-line with previous research (Lovelace, Roberts, and Kellar 2016). A disproportionate number of car crashes appear to happen in the afternoon.

Further work

There is much potential to extend the package beyond downloading, reading and formatting STATS19 data. The greatest potential is to provide functions that will help with analysis of STATS19 data, to help with road safety research. Much academic research has been done using the data, a few examples of which are highlighted below to demonstrate the wide potential for further work.

Research exploring the effectiveness of road safety policies such as speed limits. An example in this area is this paper on 20 mph zones who found that areas with 20mph speed limits were safer. This raises the question: can the same result be repeated using reproducible methods? Does the finding hold for more recent 20 mph zones? Is the recent finding of the Department for Transport’s (2018) research, that 20 mph zones alone do not reduce crash rates, supported by reproducible analysis? What are the factors that make speed limits more or less effective (see sarkar_street_2018? for example)?
Research into weather as a contributing factor to road traffic casualties (e.g. Edwards 1998). This raises the question: could matching crash data from the STATS19 data with historic weather data from other R packages help advance knowledge in this area?
Assessment of crash rates normalised by estimated exposure rates (risk). An example of this type of research by an author of the package found substantial spatial variation in the number of cyclist casualties across West Yorkshire (Lovelace, Roberts, and Kellar 2016). This raises the questions: are similar spatial differences found in other regions? What are the factors leading to relatively high and low rates of different types of crash?

The broader point is that the stats19 package could help road safety research, by making open access data on road crashes more accessible to researchers worldwide. By easing the data download and cleaning stages of research, it could also encourage reproducible analysis in the field.

There is great potential to add value to and gain insight from the data by joining the datasets with open data, for example from the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC, which funded this research), OpenStreetMap and the UK’s Ordnance Survey. If you have any suggestions on priorities for these future directions of (hopefully safe) travel, please get in touch on at github.com/ITSLeeds/stats19/issues.

References

Edwards, Julia B. 1998. “The Relationship Between Road Accident Severity and Recorded Weather.” Journal of Safety Research 29 (4): 249–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-4375(98)00051-6.

Elvik, Rune, Truls Vaa, Alena Erke, and Michael Sorensen. 2009. The Handbook of Road Safety Measures. Emerald Group Publishing.

Feleke, Robel, Shaun Scholes, Malcolm Wardlaw, and Jennifer S. Mindell. 2018. “Comparative Fatality Risk for Different Travel Modes by Age, Sex, and Deprivation.” Journal of Transport & Health 8 (March): 307–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2017.08.007.

Lovelace, Robin, Hannah Roberts, and Ian Kellar. 2016. “Who, Where, When: The Demographic and Geographic Distribution of Bicycle Crashes in West Yorkshire.” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, Bicycling and bicycle safety, 41, Part B. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2015.02.010.