Geodemographic profiling of road casualty risk across Devon

This research paper identified a helpful methodology for analysing the relationships between deprivation and road casualty propensity.The paper was authored by Lucy Martin, an assistant transport planning officer at Devon County Council (DCC).

The objectives of the paper were to:

1: Investigate the geo-demographic characteristics of DCC’s resident road casualties
using statistics to combine DCC’s Stats19 records with MOSAIC and the IMD.

2: Discuss characteristics of MOSAIC groups over-represented amongst DCC casualties
and how these compare with over-representation in the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD).

3: Provide recommendations to DCC as to how interventions could be targeted in terms
of demographics, delivery and geography

The conclusions were:

• Correlations between deprivation and casualty propensity have been explored through
the differing representation of certain geo-demographic characteristics within Devon’s
casualty population, helping to answer calls for increased public-health road safety
research. Strong correlations, especially between KSI casualties and the IMD, align with
literature, helping confirm that issues of equity (Sharma, 2008:1041) exist outside the
urban and amongst a wider casualty pool than child pedestrians or blameworthy
drivers (Hurst, 2011). The use of MOSAIC’s more sophisticated postcode groupings
largely agreed with associations, with M-Family Basics the stand-out profile of concern.
Yet, MOSAIC also brought to light the over-representation of some more ‘privileged’
profiles otherwise likely obscured in the general deprivation trend.

• Correlations thus appear to perpetuate within rural areas, with a focus on the
importance of ‘relative’ and perceived deprivation (Newby et al 1978; DfCLG, 2015b),
over ‘absolute’ poverty. It is noted that, despite much literature (PHE, 2017) arguing the existence of extreme rural deprivation, classification systems utilised largely failed to pick this up; overcoming this is suggested as an area for future research (Bertin et al 2014).

• DCC are experiencing rising numbers of road casualty KSIs in the face of ambitious
international reduction targets (EC, 2011; ETSC, 2016) and safe systems approaches
(Parnell et aål 2016). Recommendations suggest how behavioural interventions could be
tailored, making use of MOSAIC to target ‘at risk’ areas of society, both demographically
and geographically.