Family Buying6 min read

STATS19 Road Safety: The Data Most Family Buyers Ignore

DfT publishes every road collision in England with location, severity and casualty count. Here's how to use it when you're buying a family home — and what counts as 'too close to a busy road'.


What STATS19 is


The Department for Transport (DfT) publishes a yearly file of every collision attended by police in Great Britain. It's the cleanest road-safety dataset in the country: lat/lng, severity (fatal / serious / slight), casualty counts, road type, weather, light conditions.


We ingest the last 3 years of it into our property scoring. For every property we measure collisions within 1500m of the centroid and weight by KSI (killed-or-seriously-injured) — fatal × 5, serious × 2, slight × 1.


What 'normal' looks like


A typical English suburban outcode: 3–8 KSI per year in a 1500m radius. Anything in that range is normal urban traffic.


A central-city outcode: 15–40 KSI per year. Higher because you're surrounded by main roads and pedestrian volume is dense.


A rural village: under 1 KSI per year, but a single A-road collision can dominate the local figure.


What's a red flag


+More than 60 KSI/year in a 1500m radius — usually means the property sits on or beside a major arterial
+Multiple fatal collisions in three years on the same junction within 200m of the property
+An above-median KSI rate in an otherwise quiet outcode — the property is the outlier, not the area

What matters for family buyers


Two things STATS19 is uniquely good at telling you:


1.Whether the school run is dangerous. Plot collisions and the obvious black spots are between the property and the nearest schools. Our family-persona scoring weights road-safety inverse at 10% precisely because of this.

2.Whether the road outside your house is the road outside your house. A residential lane with three slight collisions over 3 years is fine. A B-road with two fatals and four serious is not — even if the postcode looks lovely on Rightmove.

→ Family rankings (with road-safety integrated): /rankings/family

→ Pull a property report — every report lists fatal/serious/slight counts in a 1.5km radius for the last 3 years


Caveats


STATS19 is collision data only — it doesn't capture near-misses, vehicle speeds, or air quality from traffic. It doesn't capture cyclist incidents that weren't attended by police. So it's a floor on road risk, not a ceiling. Use it alongside a site visit at school-run time.


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