A data science collaborative project on Road accidents in UK, 2015 - CatBoost Team

Accidents have a holistic impact in every society we find ourselves today, hence the need of for continuous ‎improvement of every system that contributes to accidents in our society today.‎ In this study we aim to focus our research or study on the UK. We got the UK_Accident_2015 Data for this ‎purpose. ‎ We aim for a safe road system, which implies a system designed to drastically reduce or eliminate fatal ‎accidents or reduction of injuries on the UK roads.‎ To achieve this, we focused our research on these key areas from the data acquired from the UK Accidents ‎in 2015.‎ Key Areas:-‎

• Safe road users
• Safe vehicles
• Safe speeds
• Safe road design
• Weather conditions

Focusing on a safe system that is to reduce death and serious injuries through design that ‎accommodates or gives ample tolerance for human errors and injury.‎ Based on our analysis on the data the United Kingdom road safety deviates from the ideal safe ‎road system by not tackling these 5 key areas, which has resulted in the increased number of ‎accidents in the UK roads as indicated by these statistics gotten from the data ‎2015 Statistics On Accidents:-‎

• ‎140,056 Accidents‎
• ‎180,000 Persons affected (Ranging from Fatal to Slight Injuries)‎
• ‎15,000 Casualties Monthly

Our project not only aims to understand how these 5 keys areas contributed to the increase of ‎these accidents, but also determine the locations and time to enable us proffer viable solutions to ‎the problem. ‎

##Summary of Findings

• Raising speed limits increases the number of casualties, but a slight look into the data shows that Low Speed limit of 30km/hr resulted in more casualties as against vehicles on high speed as shown below:

• Vehicles as against high speed vehicles which shows clearly that vehicles moving at a speed of 30km/h resulted in more accidents.

• Obviously, analysis revealed about 75% of the accidents occured on single carriage roads ( a road with vehicles moving in opposite directions without any form of barriers to divide the opposite incoming vehicle ), as a result led to the spike in accidents, which ranges from full head on collision to near miss brush between opposing vehicles.

• poor design/ structural construction contributed to the rise in accident rate as over 60% of the accidents occurred mostly at junction points.

• At first glance its easy to attribute most of the accidents, to conditions that are present on the road surface, like wet, damp, frosty or iced surfaces but insight from the data shows that 72.5% of accidents occurred on Dry road surface. While other surface conditions amounted to just 27.5%. This reveals that road surface condition's isn't really the major cause of road accidents in the UK in 2015.

• Bad weather significantly increases the chance of a car accident. Conditions such as fog, rain, sleet, snow, and ice not only hamper visibility but it can also affect the performance of your vehicle. But this wasn't the case regarding the Uk road accidents data. Majority of the accidents occured on a Good weather condition.

• Light conditions are known to affect the number of vehicle accidents and fatalities but the relationship between light conditions and accident severity is not fully understood as more accidents occured during the day and most were slight

• Due to high traffic of vehicles, pedestrian's and cyclist in Urban areas than rural areas, accident tends to occur in this area as a result, but based on the analysis from the UK accident data it was discovered that there was a reasonable increase in accidents in the rural areas.

• On checking the effectiveness of the Police officers, it is seen that police officer visited the scene more. This denote an activeness to rescue by the police force in the UK

A significant number of accidents occured on week days (Mondays - Fridays) during rush hours: 8AM, 5PM and 6pm

Based on our expert analysis from the UK Accident Data 2015, we can say with 85% surety that a major factor that contributed to accidents in the UK was as a result of poor design and construction of the roads ( Singe Carriage Lanes ).

There was no physical barriers preventing opposing vehicles from head on collusion or contact. Natural phenomenon didn't play a major role in accidents like weather, poor lighting condition/poor visibility, etc.

So it is safe to conclude that most of these accidents would be preventable if the design of the roads will be revised and barriers put in place to curb the accident trends on the UK roads.

This project is a requirement for a successful completion of the Hamoye Datascience Internship

• pandas
• numpy
• matplotlib
• seaborn