The research is based on five years’ data covering over 120,000 child road casualties and is the first time that such a detailed study has been conducted. The findings indicate that children living in Preston are more than twice as likely to be injured on the road than the national average, and five times more likely than those in Kensington & Chelsea.

In a report titled “Child Casualties 2010; A study into resident risk of children on roads in Great Britain 2004-08”, the level of risk children are exposed to is compared across 408 local authority areas and shows that children living in some areas have almost a one in 200 chance of being injured each year. Using Experian’s Mosaic profiling tool, Road Safety Analysis has also been able to show that areas with a greater prevalence of deprivation are also at much greater risk than those from more affluent areas.

Over their first 16 years of life, one in every 27 children, less than the size of an average class, will be reported as injured or even killed in a collision.

More specific findings from the report show that:

• The national average is for one child (aged 0-15 years) in every 427 to be injured in a road traffic crash each year.

• The children most at risk are those from “families on lower incomes who often live in large council estates where there is little owner-occupation” and are found in most regions in the UK, with the exception of the South East and London. Experian’s Mosaic analysis suggests that they are not inner-city communities, but are more commonly found in the outer suburbs of large provincial cities as some of the most deprived communities in United Kingdom and represent 6.52 per cent of the total population

• Road safety risk is at its highest on a Friday, the next highest day is Saturday.  Sunday is the day that the fewest number of casualties are recorded

• May is when the highest number of recorded child casualties are reported while the winter months show child casualties decreasing by approximately 25 per cent. Child pedestrian casualties are actually at their lowest in August, potentially due to there being fewer children in the country

• Overall, children are less likely to be injured on the roads than adults

Dan Campsall, director of Road Safety Analysis says, “The results of this study show a worrying discrepancy between different parts of the country. Children in some areas experience considerably higher risk from road traffic crashes than others who might be living just over the border. There is still further study to be undertaken and we are keen to make sure all of the data and analysis techniques that underpin this study can be accessed by local authorities to allow them to investigate how they might ensure the safety of children from their communities.”

Andy Ward, Experian Public Sector adds, “Mosaic profiling has been used to highlight the danger young children face by local authority area across the UK. It is essential that local authorities have access to this insight so they can better inform campaigns and educate citizens on the importance of road safety and we hope the findings from this study will be used to make roads a safer place for young people.”

For a copy of the full report including a breakdown of casualty rates for all 408 districts click here

To download a copy of the national  map showing risk by area please click here

To download a copy of the full press release please click here

At the 5th Annual CIHT Awards ceremony the project team were presented with the Highly Commended prize in the innovation category. The judges appreciated the very rapid progress that MAST had made and the potential benefits that it would bring.

“The development of a unique and widely accessible online database of road casualty statistics, incorporating socio-demographic classifications, is enabling better targeting of road safety interventions. The judges were impressed by the way the powerful database and a broad user community had already been developed, providing a step change in accident analysis and significant road safety benefits.” CIHT Judging Panel

Bruce Walton, the Project Manager, expressed his delight that MAST had received this level of recognition after just a few months:

“To gain the recognition of such a highly regarded institution is extremely satisfying for myself and my colleagues. Whilst we have put in a huge amount of work to turn MAST into a reality and we have heard from many practitioners about how MAST is making a real difference their work on a daily basis this independent assessment of the importance of MAST is incredibly important.”

The see all the awards and download the brochure from the ceremony please visit the CIHT website.

MAST revealed to users for the first time

The autumn was an amazing time as we were spread all across the country giving presentations on what MAST was and how it could serve the needs of professional analysts, marketers and road safety officers alike. As demanding as that was it resulted in a remarkable take-up for the initial release, with around 750 users choosing to register from around 250 organisations. As exciting as this response had been the work still needed to be completed and MAST required further development to ensure that all of those users received the highest quality product that we could deliver.

With the user base came the need for training too and the spring was dominated by the need to ensure that a competent user community could be trained up to get the very best out of MAST.  Over just three months, and with only the main project team of 3 to lean on, we conducted training for around 230 users in every corner of the British Isles; many of whom have gone on to deliver training to colleagues across their own organisations.

The substantial change for MAST came in April when the grant funding came to an end.  Determined to secure a future for MAST, the original project team set-up the not-for-profit company that would support it in the future. Establishing the new model also meant that subscription fees would have to be charged; as much as we wanted to be able to continue to offer it freely to the profession! Around 70% if users who signed-up for MAST when it was free to use have transferred across to the new model, and that means that there are some 150 organisations operating at local, regional and national levels that are all using MAST Online to deliver some excellent analysis.

New functions have been added, new data will be coming on stream in the next few weeks, further developements are in the pipeline, so as we cast back over the year that has past it is amazing to see how far we have come; but there is a huge amount still to do to ensure that MAST continues bring great benefit to the whole road safety community.

At first, the initial version will cover crash data for 2004 to 2007, but DfT have already confirmed that an update to add all the latest 2008 data will be made avaialble within weeks of the launch.

The release of MAST could not be more timely. The Government’s new Road Safety Strategy will be unveiled in the forseeable future, and it is expected to include commitments to better use of data and socio-demographic techniques. Project Manager Bruce Walton said “This is an exciting time for Road Safety. MAST is very much in tune with our target to make Britain’s roads the safest in the world.”

Everyone on the MAST Newsletter mailing list will be invited to attend the launch events. If you are not on the mailing list, but would like to attend or receive further information, please contact us

A ‘beta’ version of the online data tool is already under development, and a nationwide network of 50 testers have started assessing the product in advance of general release. Steering Group have agreed to meet again in June to assess the outcome of testing, and the project team will work closely with web developers Aeriandi to implement any necessary modifications. Project Manager Bruce Walton said “I am delighted with the sterling efforts made by Aeriandi. They have pulled out all the stops to deliver a version for testing in plenty of time.”

Steering Group are determined to ensure that the initial product will represent a synergy between flexibility and accessibility: making the key facts easy to find for all users, while also allowing analysts to delve more deeply. To this end, testers have been recruited from every part of the Road Safety profession, and the next phase of development will be informed by their feedback.

Since their inception in 2002, Aeriandi have earned an enviable track record for supplying pioneering and secure hosted applications. Their unique blend of experience, creativity and technical capability has enabled them to lead the market in provision of Customer Interaction Software, so they are perfectly placed to play this pivotal role in delivering MAST. Aeriandi CEO Matthew Bryars commented “MAST is an incredibly exciting project for the whole team. We have the opportunity to provide a unique and innovative application, while also contributing to saving lives on Britain’s roads.”

Since prevailing against stiff competition from rival firms in March, Aeriandi have plunged quickly into the development process. Equipped with findings from the progressive data analysis techniques conceived and implemented by MAST’s specialists, they aim to prepare functional web content for the Project Steering Group in April, to show ’proof of concept’ . As a result, it is hoped that the Initial Version of MAST will be available for general release to Road Safety stakeholders nationwide by the summer.

Road safety data is often presented within strictly confined geographical limits, typically those of the police force area in question. I’ve come across some analysis in my time which almost seems to assume that the force area boundary is the edge of a flat earth. Now when engineering interventions are considered, this approach is often required by the budgetary and operational constraints of highway authorities. Similarly it can make sense when looking at enforcement, as force jurisdiction is a relevant factor. However, it makes little sense to think like this when it comes to education and publicity interventions – because populations live in real communities which do not respect the neat dotted lines on our maps. The drivers who get themselves involved in crashes cross such boundaries all the time, without even being aware of their existence.

One of the reasons why MAST makes so much sense as a national initiative is to stimulate joined-up thinking when planning interventions. No campaign is complete without a knowledge of what kind of people are driving into your ‘patch’, crashing all over the place, and then going home to an ajacent area which lies beyond the reach of your publicity machine. Similarly, we could all benefit by asking ourselves what kind of crashes our council tax payers might be having in other parts of the country, where our STATS19 data can’t see them.

Now, approaching these issues involves a degree of technical complexity, and this is something which MAST will seek to adress. I’ll come back to the detail of just how MAST will represent the nation’s geography in a later blog, but just to be going on with, here’s an example of the kind of issue which might arise. This morning, I was asked by a rural authority in Scotland whether MAST could be used to explore what happens when the local population, who more often drive on single track roads than dual carriageways, venture onto the national motorway network. The answer is yes – this is exactly the kind of question which MAST is designed to answer.

Perhaps you can think of similar issues which may affect road users who reside or drive in your area – after all, you wouldn’t want to be running scared of the dragons, would you?

Andrew Sheffield, the Director of Service Transformation at the Cabinet Office, was impressed when he attended a presentation on the MAST Project a few months ago. He recognised the project as an example of how thinking differently about target audiences could bring big changes to the way in which government at all levels engages with the public. As a result, MAST will feature as a high profile case study in the next issue of ‘Customer Matters’, a publication which is circulated widely to ministers and senior civil servants right across government.

MAST Communications Consultant Dan Campsall commented “I will be delighted if our pioneering work in road safety could help to improve services across the public sector.”

My colleagues Richard and Dan, from the Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership, had developed something they called Headline Data. It was successfully delivering socio-demographic analysis of crash data in the Thames Valley area – so successfully, in fact, that they even won an award for it. It seemed like such a neat idea they wanted it to share it with the world. The DfT agreed, funding was set up and so the MAST Project was born. It fell to me to deliver the Son of Headline Data.

Now long experience has taught me that when it comes to data, delivery is everything. You can give a client the most insightful, ingenious and potentially valuable analysis in all the world, but unless you deliver it in exactly the right way, you might as well not bother. If your clients can’t instantly access it, don’t immediately understand it or cannot see precisely how it fits their requirements, then they will simply ignore it. Any potential benefit will be lost and all your hard work was probably in vain. This may seem harsh, but it’s often true – and if it’s ever fallen to you to explain data analysis to someone who just doesn’t get it, then you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Headline Data had been delivered as a self-contained Excel spreadsheet, with lots of pivot table caches driving the analysis and a few macros thrown in to link it all together. That worked just fine for the Partnership Team in Thames Valley, and was OK for the handful of local partners who used it. However, when I constructed a sample Excel application along similar lines for MAST it quickly became apparent that this approach was not sufficiently scaleable. It was useful for demonstration purposes, but at the price of being slow, inflexible, tricky to operate and hard to maintain. As a method of delivering quality analysis to Road Safety practitioners all over the country, it was a non-starter.

So how should the MAST baby be delivered instead? How could it inherit the good qualities of its ancestor, while evolving into something which was better fitted to rise to the challenge of delivery on a national scale? Both the Project Team and Steering Group considered this question, and came to the same conclusion: forget desktop applications, and look to the Web!

Choosing a delivery route is one thing – but putting it into practice is another. In a future blog, I’ll post a bit about how we went about approaching this task.

MAST has been described as “admirable and commendable” by Richard Webber, creator of the MOSAIC geo-demographic classification system and Visiting Professor at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. His comments came on a day when groundbreaking customer insight projects from across the UK’s public sector were showcased by Experian, the international leaders in providing information and analytical tools. Much of the analysis within MAST is powered by MOSAIC Public Sector, provided by Experian UK.

Many public sector organisations are looking carefully at how to place customer insight techniques at the heart of their operations. With active government encouragement from the Improvement and Development Agency, such methods are set to become an essential part of public service delivery in future

Experian invited the MAST team to demonstrate their analytical techniques. Professor Webber, who was present, said later that MAST “was the best thing I’ve seen … it has made the day worthwhile”.