Rural Road Safety: Drivers and Driving (Annex report)

The Scottish Government and Road Safety Scotland commissioned research to explore the causes of rural road accidents in Scotland and build up typologies of rural road drivers. The research began in January 2007 with an analysis of the contributory factors recorded by police reporting officers using the STATS 19 national accident reporting system. This report, an annex to the main study report (Rural Road Safety: Drivers and Driving), presents detailed results of that analysis.

The contributory factors for a road accident are the factors, such as excessive speed and driver fatigue, which, in the reporting officer’s opinion, contributed significantly to the causation of the accident.

Each accident record contained a code prepared by the Scottish Government to show the type of area in which the accident occurred, using six types ranging from large urban areas to remote rural areas1. According to this classification, 39% of accidents occurred in rural areas, so there was a substantial body of accident data to analyse.

The report compares the patterns of causation for rural and urban accidents in various ways. The following table lists the 10 factors reported most frequently in serious rural accidents in Scotland, and shows the percentage of accidents in which these factors were reported. For example, loss of control (Factor 410) was reported in 32% of serious accidents in rural areas.