By Professor John Robertson OBA
From Transport Scotland – Road accidents in Scotland data: FOI release, published today, we can see that all road collisions with an injury, at all speed limits, have fallen dramatically since 2019, ignoring the Pandemic-caused dips in 2020 and 2021 when road traffic was significantly reduced.
Of particular interest, the injury collisions in the 30mph limit have fallen by 34%.
Similarly, collisions involving HGVs have fallen across all speed limits>
Critics may spot, if they read on, that injury road collisions where speed contributed to the collision have increased slightly since 2019, from 165 to 173 but remember, if there are less collisions all together, that proportion will inevitably increase.
Most of these FoIs are requested by the likes of Alex Cole-Hamilton of the Lib Dumbs, so it will be interesting to see if and how they try to spin this.
Source: https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202400443231/
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Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
There was an example of appalling journalism on the BBC Scotland website yesterday, when three child pedestrians were injured in a road accident. Two of the children had to be taken to hospital. How did BBC Scotland report this? – three children collided with a car!
It is welcome that the trend for these data is downwards.
Setting aside, for the moment the data for 30mph, it is clear that the higher the speed the greater number of injuries. Since it is the transfer of energy from the moving vehicle to persons during a collision and since energy increases in proportion to the square of the speed, then collisions at lower speeds transfer less energy and injuries are less severe. For example, a vehicle travelling at 40mph will transfer FOUR times the amount of energy as a car travelling at 20mph during a collision.
The data for 30mph are so much higher than for other speeds because it is the speed limit in many built up areas.
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Yes, would also have been interesting to see a breakdown showing how many SUVs
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There is a fair bit of research on SUVs, much of it American. SUVs are deemed to be trucks and are not built to the same safety standards as saloon cars. However, they are marketed as lifestyle cars for your whole family, they are status symbols, they show the owner is phallically well endowed, even the women drivers.
Unlike standard saloons, where the drivers’ and pedestrians’ eye levels are similar and can easily make eye contact, the SUV driver is above the eye level of pedestrians and so human contact is less. The elevation and body length means drivers cannot see as easily as a saloon driver when a small person, such as a child is in the space in front of the car.
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Wrote this in July 2023
https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2023/07/07/suvs-8-times-more-likely-to-kill-a-child/
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