Inequalities in self-report road injury risk in Britain: A new analysis of National Travel Survey data, focusing on pedestrian injuries

Document summary

In 2007, Britain’s (since 2013 England’s) National Travel Survey started asking respondents about experiences of ‘road accidents’. This paper conducts new injury analysis using NTS data from 2007-15. The resultant dataset contains 147,185 adult individuals (weighted), of whom 17,990 reported experiencing one or more ‘road accidents’ in the three years prior to the survey date. This dataset includes incidents involving other road users and those that did not, less likely in general to be included in police injury data, and not at all in the case of pedestrian falls. The paper firstly compares this self-report injury data with police data, including comparisons for different user groups such as pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists. Most studies of under-reporting focus on deaths and serious injuries, due to lack of other data on slight injuries. Self-report data enables a focus on that majority of injuries which are slight but may impact people’s experiences of travel.

The paper then compares the frequency of different types of pedestrian injury incident and finds that collisions in which a cyclist injures a pedestrian remain in this dataset very infrequent compared either to falls or to pedestrian injuries involving motor vehicles. Finally, characteristics of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles and in falls are examined. A binary logistic regression analysis examines odds of being injured as a pedestrian either by a motor vehicle, or in a fall, controlling for self-report walking frequency. Disabled pedestrians, those living in low-income households, and in London are at higher risk of being injured by a motor vehicle, while older and disabled pedestrians and women are at higher risk of being injured in a fall. Implications for policy and research are discussed.