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The inequalities of road traffic injury

A team at UCL has exposed stark inequalities in young people’s risk of being killed or seriously injured in road traffic accidents, despite measures to reduce risk.

A bike on the pavement.

30 June 2022

Children living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England are more likely to be killed or seriously injured on the roads than their peers living in more affluent areas. But little is known about who is most at risk and why.

A team led by Professor Nicola Christie (UCL Centre for Transport Studies) investigated road traffic injury risk across childhood to encourage policymakers to view these differences in risk as a health inequality.

The UCL team analysed data on road traffic collisions involving pedestrians, cyclists and car occupants recorded in England in 2016, focusing on children aged 4–10 and 11–15 living in areas with different levels of deprivation.

“We’ve known since the 1980s that children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be killed or seriously injured on the roads than their peers from the highest socioeconomic groups,” explained Professor Christie.

“Our research reveals that decades after the disparities in risk of traffic collisions and serious injury were exposed, inequalities still exist, particularly for pedestrians"

The UCL team wanted to explore the inequalities of injury risk relating to gender and transport type. They analysed data from the Office for National Statistics, the National Travel Survey and a police dataset of road traffic collisions that resulted in personal injury. Individual’s postcodes were linked to the indices of multiple deprivation (IMD) – a nationwide measure of neighbourhood deprivation using data on income, employment, health, skills and training, crime, housing and living environment.

The study showed that children living in disadvantaged areas are more likely to be a pedestrian and therefore potentially at more risk of collisions on the roads. But even when accounting for this, children living in the most deprived areas were nearly three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured as pedestrians than their peers in the least deprived areas.

The team also highlighted that young males are at increased risk as they approach adolescence, particularly when cycling. Across all measures of deprivation, males aged 11–15 were ten times more likely to suffer serious injury as a cyclist than females.

“Our research reveals that decades after the disparities in risk of traffic collisions and serious injury were exposed, inequalities still exist, particularly for pedestrians,” says Professor Christie, who is engaging with Transport for London to encourage changes to current road safety measures.

Initiatives developed over the past decade, such as safe crossings, information and enforcement campaigns, and engineering measures that reduce the speed and volume of traffic, have helped reduce the risk of road traffic injury, but children from deprived communities are still at greater risk.

“Recognising road traffic injury as a public health issue will help us to reduce the inequalities we see, by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental factors that shape people’s behaviour,’ says Professor Christie.


Image Credit: iStock/ Hleb Usovich