Identified risk: road traffic collisions
More people are killed and seriously injured in road traffic collisions than in fires. While we do not need to attend every road traffic collision in our Service area, they do form a significant part of our emergency response.
Number of road traffic collisions attended and victims who were killed or seriously injured
Drawing from our identified risk table (https://www.dsfire.gov.uk/community-risk-plan/risks), the chart below shows the number of road traffic collisions (RTCs) attended and the number of people killed and seriously injured (KSI) per financial year. For the years 2016/17 to 2020/21 the actual number recorded is shown. For subsequent years a forecast is shown. Road traffic collisions can result in a fire as a result of fuel coming into contact with an ignition source. Where vehicles catch fire but are not involved in a collision, we record these separately.
Proportion of road traffic collisions by contributory factor, South West England, April 2015 to March 2020
The chart below shows that almost 40% of road traffic collisions have ‘driver/rider error or reaction’ as a contributory factor and about 15% of road traffic collisions have ‘Injudicious action’ (meaning showing very poor judgement) as a contributory factor. Special codes relate to specific endorsement and ‘penalty points’. The contributory factors present in more than 10% of collisions are ‘behaviour or inexperience’ and ‘impairment or distraction'.