Road traffic collision statistics

We collect information about road traffic collisions and use this to make our roads safer.

This helps us direct our work in the most efficient and effective manner. We compile and validate this information together with the Department for Transport.

Most recent data

The tables below capture year-on-year data about crashes and casualties in Leeds. The disruption caused to travel patterns by the Covid-19 pandemic means that there were significant reductions in casualty numbers in 2020 and 2021 across the country, and this is reflected in the data for Leeds. Comparisons of 2022 data with 2019 are therefore likely to be more reliable than comparisons with 2020 and 2021.

In April 2021, West Yorkshire Police (WYP) changed the system being used to record road traffic collisions. The system now being used, called CRASH, automatically assigns a severity classification to each casualty according to the injuries recorded by the reporting Police Officer, whereas the previous system allowed the reporting officer to specify the severity directly. Where CRASH has been previously rolled out elsewhere in the country, there has generally been a significant increase in the proportion of reported casualties which are classified as serious. This seems to be being replicated across West Yorkshire. We will continue to review the data with colleagues at WYP and the West Yorkshire councils.

The new system ensures a more consistent classification of severity but raises issues with presenting long terms trends in the numbers of casualties of different severities. To address this, the Department for Transport has published datasets in which the casualty severities have been adjusted to account for the change to the new system, and the DfT recommends that the adjusted data be used when making long-term comparisons. The data presented in this report for collisions occurring prior to April 2021 has been adjusted in accordance with the DfT’s recommendations.

there are three broad categories of injury severity: slight, serious and fatal
the most catastrophic injuries (fatal and serious) are jointly referred to as 'killed or seriously injured' (KSI)
'All severity' injuries refer to KSIs plus slight injuries

Personal-injury collisions on roads in Leeds, 2017-2022

There were 1,585 personal-injury collisions recorded in Leeds in 2022. This includes all collisions resulting in death or injury occurring within the highway and reported to the police, in which one or more vehicles are involved. The figure for 2022 was higher than the preceding 2 years, during which reductions in traffic relating to the COVID-19 pandemic led to a reduction in collisions across the country. The total for 2022 was slightly above the average for 2017-2019 (1,569). There were 27 fatal collisions in Leeds in 2022, and this exceeds the average for 2017-19 (18).

Year	Slight	Serious	Fatal	Total
2017	1,293	407	11	1,711
2018	1,130	394	23	1,547
2019	1,027	401	21	1,449
2020	707	278	10	995
2021	1,010	278	19	1,387
2022	1,080	478	27	1,585
Total	5,594	2,316	111	8,674

Casualties on roads in Leeds, 2017-2022

There were 2,044 people injured in collisions recorded in Leeds in 2022 – note that this is higher than the number of collisions reported above, as individual collisions can result in more than one casualty. This was higher than the preceding 2 years, and was slightly above the average for 2017-2019 (2,034). 27 people were killed in collisions in Leeds in 2022, and this exceeds the average for 2017-19 (21).

Year	Slight	Serious	Fatal	Total
2017	1,755	433	15	2,203
2018	1,540	428	26	1,994
2019	1,438	445	22	1,905
2020	932	300	11	1,243
2021	1,359	395	19	1,773
2022	1,488	529	27	2,044
Total	8,512	2,530	120	11,162

Fatal and serious injury casualties by road-user, 2017-2022

Most of those killed or seriously injured are not users of enclosed vehicles such as cars and goods vehicles, but are pedestrians (25% of all KSI in Leeds in 2022), cyclists (15%), or motorcyclists (11%). Crashes are nearly twice as likely to inflict fatal or serious injuries on these road-users.

2017 to 2019

Year	2017		2018		2019
Road-user	Serious	Fatal	Serious	Fatal	Serious	Fatal
Car occupant	81	6	92	8	105	6
Pedestrian	90	7	75	15	96	8
Powered two-wheeler or passenger	66	2	67	2	56	6
Pedal cyclist or passenger	55	0	61	1	61	2
Goods vehicle occupant	7	0	8	0	10	0
Bus occupant	9	0	6	0	3	0
Taxi occupant	1	0	2	0	2	0
Horse rider	0	0	0	0	1	0
Total	309	15	311	26	334	22

2020 to 2022

Year	2020		2021		2022
Road-user	Serious	Fatal	Serious	Fatal	Serious	Fatal
Car occupant	74	7	152	7	218	5
Pedestrian	54	1	100	9	130	12
Powered two-wheeler or passenger	34	2	60	3	58	4
Pedal cyclist or passenger	48	1	49	0	77	4
Goods vehicle occupant	5	0	15	0	13	1
Bus occupant	1	0	9	0	10	0
Taxi occupant	3	0	2	0	0	0
Horse rider	0	0	0	0	0	0
Total	220	11	387	19	529	27

Totals 2017 to 2022

Road-user	Serious	Fatal	KSI
Car occupant	722	39	761
Pedestrian	545	52	597
Powered two-wheeler or passenger	341	19	360
Pedal cyclist or passenger	351	8	359
Goods vehicle occupant	58	1	59
Bus occupant	38	0	38
Taxi occupant	10	0	10
Horse rider	1	0	1
Total	2066	119	2,185