Lawford Kidd's Blog

Around 18,000 pedestrians were injured in an accident involving a vehicle in the last full year, according to new analysis by road safety charity the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM).

The charity is calling for an even greater focus on pedestrian protection to make cars safer and raise awareness of the risks.

The figures come from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request made by the IAM, asking for details of the most common pairs of contributory factors reported together by the police attending the scene of an accident in 2013.

Child pedestrians are two and a half times more likely than adults to be injured in road accidents, according to new figures from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH).

Although accident rates are falling, more child and adult pedestrians are injured in road traffic accidents in deprived areas compared with more affluent areas. Over the last decade, in deprived areas, three times as many child pedestrians were injured than in less deprived areas. Similarly, in deprived areas there were 2.5 times as many adult pedestrians injured than in less deprived areas.

For cyclists, there has been a rise in adult cyclist casualties in the last decade and casualty rates are consistently higher in the more affluent neighbourhoods, which is likely to relate to a greater number of cyclists commuting from these areas.