Facts sheet 13: The contributions of speeding, mobile phone use and alcohol use to road traffic accidents

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The following data relates to 2014. It is extracted from the DfT data here where the data below is at the foot of the spread sheet..

Table 1 shows that speeding, mobile phone use and alcohol make surprisingly small contributions to the recorded causes of casualties in road traffic accidents. The mobile phone data is particularly striking in view of how common the offense seems to be. It accounts for roughly one in 200 of all recorded causes in fatal accidents and one in 500 of the recorded causes in all injury accidents attended to by the police.

Table 1. Recorded causes as percentage of casualties and causes

	Killed	Serious	Slight	Total
Total casualties	1,651	20,120	136,839	158,640
Speeding as percent of casualties	17.08	7.45	4.86	5.32
Mobile use as percent of casualties	1.45	0.55	0.46	0.48
Drink as percent of casualties	8.54	6.70	3.97	4.36
Total causes	4,369	48,844	326,997	380,210
Speeding as % total causes	6.45	3.07	2.03	2.22
Mobile as % of total causes	0.55	0.23	0.19	0.20
Alcohol as % total causes	3.23	2.76	1.66	1.82

Further, in any accident there are usually two or more recorded causes. hence, if we suppose that eliminating one of the causes would halve the number of accidents where such a cause is recorded then eliminating the cause would save the casualties in the table below. Even if the numbers are doubled it is clear, for example, that eliminating all mobile phone use would have an entirely trivial effect on fatalities. Likewise, but less so, with speeding and alcohol use.

Table 2. Casualty saving supposing the cause is eliminated and

half the accidents containing that cause are saved

	Killed	Serious	Slight	Total
Speeding	141	750	3,326	4,217
Mobile use	12	56	317	385
Alcohol use	71	675	2,716	3,461

Note, the data in these tables do not include accidents were no police were present.

Updated September 2016

PDF:

Facts Sheet 13 Recorded causes 7.pdf