The number of road accidents should be properly monitored in Dumfries and Galloway to help improve safety, a councillor has argued.
Police Scotland and Transport Scotland focus largely on fatality numbers to identify problem hotspots and allocate funding to introduce road safety measures.
This is the wrong way to go, says Mid and Upper Nithsdale Councillor Jim Dempster. He spoke out after a road safety report was produced at the council’s communities committee last week.
The independent councillor said: “When the police or Transport Scotland are assessing the need for major improvements in road safety, they take account of fatal and serious accidents, and they add a value to that. That’s then used to justify the road improvement.
“But they never include road accidents. So, we could have a situation where there are countless accidents occurring on a fairly regular basis.
“But because nobody is seriously injured, or God forbid there’s a fatal incident, they’re not used as a means of justifying road improvements
“I find that an anomaly and something that needs to be looked at because you shouldn’t need to be badly injured or die to find out where the bad spots on a particular stretch of road are.
“That was always the way of it. There had to be a fatal of serious injury before that reflected in a report looking for upgrading sections of a road.”
Annandale East and Eskdale Councillor Archie Dryburgh, chairman of the communities committee, said that he had also discussed this issue with the council’s roads department about his own ward.
He added: “There does seem to be a lack of information, especially where there’s no police involvement and no injury accidents.”
Anthony Topping, the council’s team leader on road safety, said: “In the past Police Scotland did try and collate all damage only accidents when they could get the information.
“Now you only need to report an accident if there has been an injury. So, it’s the collating of damage-only incidents that’s quite difficult at the moment.
“It’s why we do focus on the deaths and serious injuries.”
He added: “In the past we have looked at hotspots of damage-only incidents because, as you know, a damage-only is just a serious or fatal probably waiting to happen.
“But at the moment we don’t have a database for damage-only incidents.”
The discussion followed the release of a report by the fire service last week which confirmed that the number of road traffic accidents that are recorded across Dumfries and Galloway almost doubled last year.
There were 97 road traffic accidents across the region in 2021/22 – compared to 51 during the previous 12 months.
Casualty numbers from those accidents also rose from 42 in 2020/21 to 70 in 2021/22.
