I recently used an FOI request to find out the details and location of every road accident in the Saddleworth area since 2000. Authorities will normally only release ‘headline’ figures of casualties or accidents on a council-wide basis, but I used FOI to get not only the figures for the specific council wards which cover my area, but also details about each incident, including the exact location where each took place.

My interest in this issue was prompted by a local road, the A62 Huddersfield Road. I’d noticed it was often described in the local paper, or by councillors, as the ‘notorious’ or ‘dangerous’ A62. But there never seemed to be any statistics provided to back up this assertion. So I thought I’d see if I could find some data that might do just that, especially as the council had last year imposed new speed limits on stretches of the road, and had spent money on new warning signs.

My actual FOI request was very straightforward. I simply asked for details of every road accident which had been recorded on public roads in my three local council wards since 1 January 2000 (obviously this means ten years of data, I’ve been told by people who know about road safety that you need at least five years to see a pattern emerging). I also requested brief descriptions of each accident and, if possible, a map showing the precise location of them all, data I was keen to receive to see if I could pick out any specific accident blackspots in the local area.

Sure enough, after 20 days the council sent me all the information I asked for. The headline figures were surprising, showing a sharp fall in both the number of accidents and the amount of people either injured or killed. They sent me both short descriptions of each accident and small maps with the incidents all plotted precisely, a wealth of data which was pretty overwhelming when I first received it.

The data all surrounds something called a Personal Injury Accident. As you’d expect, a PIA is a road incident in which someone gets hurt, and it’s the details of these accidents which the council will send you. The short descriptions include information such as what exactly happened, the vehicles involved, the age and sex of the injured people, the weather and road conditions and any other factors which might have contributed to the incident.

While it was easy enough to write a story from the headline data (mine, published last Friday, is here – http://www.saddleworthnews.com/?p=2782), the process of looking at the rest of the data and picking out interesting trends or titbits is pretty difficult. The council sent me a map of the accidents for each of the three wards, for each of the ten years, so I was left with 30 little maps to analyse, all with dots where the accidents took place and serial numbers linking them to the brief written reports I’d also been sent.

To try to identify any blackspots, I decided to divide the maps into different junctions and stretches of road, and make a note on a separate piece of paper of how many accidents happened in each area in each year. This was a bit time-consuming and dull, but I was able to establish that certain stretches of, for example, the A62 had far more incidents on them than others. Most interestingly of all, in the data the council sent me covering the first half of 2010, after the new speed limits had been imposed, I was able to see that there had been no accidents anywhere on the A62 in Saddleworth during that time (I gave this a mention in my first story, and will write more about this specifically later this week).

As it happens, in my area councillors and others already seemed to be well aware of the dangers of that particular road, but it may be that the data in your area reveals a series of incidents in an unexpected place. This could form the basis of a local campaign for your site, which will be all the stronger for having proper data to back it up. There’s also the possibility that a particular type of incident seems to happen a lot, whether it’s teenagers being knocked down near a school or cyclists being hit on a specific road, and that might be worth investigating further.

I’m now expanding my own investigation, and have asked a neighbouring council for data relating to the A62 as it runs through their area, where there aren’t the sort of safety measures imposed in Saddleworth. There’s also nothing stopping you requesting the latest data again in six months or a year’s time, so you can monitor whether the situation is improving or not and keep a steady supply of interesting stories for your site.

One last point. By ‘interesting’ I don’t mean it has to be a bad news story about people dying or being injured. The data I got for my area showed a generally positive picture. But to my mind, for a hyperlocal site, a good news story about casualties coming down and safety measures actually working is just as interesting, especially as local newspapers traditionally focus on the negative, often complete with pictures of angry-looking councillors next to a junction.

Getting road safety data from your council is a good way of producing content which can be tailored to a very local audience. Even if your site covers just a street or an estate, you’ll be able to get that kind of targeted information. And it can give you distinctive, meaty stories about your local area, which your readers will still find interesting when they find them on Google weeks or even months after you’ve published them.

Today the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister kicked off the big society work with a seminar in No10 around the cabinet table.  I was privileged to be there with fellow hyperlocal web person Ally Tibbit of Greener Leith and web campaigner Martha Lane Fox.  There were a host of luminaries from the community activism sector about 20 in all . I’ll follow up with the some detail later, but this is an impressionistic write up shortly after the event (mainly written in the back of a taxi picking up a new cat from Battersea).

For me, as an old Whitehall hand (my day job before talk about local) this was the first time the coalition thing has really sunk in.  It was remarkable to see two leaders of different political parties sit opposite each other at the cabinet table and govern together.  The big society is perhaps easier common ground, the deputy prime minister said that the liberals and the conservatives had been talking about the same thing but with different labels.  For the DPM a big society that embraced community grass roots action and self empowerment was core liberalism.  The Prime Minister said that he wanted a major part of his legacy to be a government that ‘laid the foundations for the big society’.
The PM and DPM were in listening mode and responded positively to the attendees.  I made points about how the web can help people be more effective and active citizens by bringing engagement into the modern age from the C19th, the importance of open data to transparency and accountability and the importance of Martha’s work on digital participation.

The last couple of months, all the big society chatter in the civic society and volunteering sectors has been ‘do they really mean it?’. Nat Wei has been highly effective in the background convincing people one on one.

In the theatre of Whitehall, symbolism is important.  You don’t get a much more symbolic commitment than your issue being the first joint outing on policy issue by the new prime minister and deputy prime minister.  So today was a strong symbolic ‘yes’.  As ever with any government, especially a new one you need to be vigilant and hold them to their word and i shall do my share of that.

Martha Lane Fox has already tweeted that ‘I am putting aside all cynicism’. I believe that a massive increase in civic activism and engagement would have a profound impact on making Britain a better place.  It’s great to see such committed government leadership on the big society and i am happy to play my part.

The local paper the Islington Gazette rang me having seen my article.  The Gazette had done some maths of their own and looked a the London Data Store site.  The Gazette covers the whole borough (an urban area about five miles square), my site just one ward (a mile long, half mile wide).  So the Gazette grew the story, got quotes from people across the borough and turned it into a bigger piece.  They did get a quote from the police, despite having a generally ‘granny scaring’ approach to covering local crime.  I am still waiting for the police to get back to me.  The Gazette in their traditional rather sad way managed to giv me a quote but no link to my original article and no mention of the plucky Kings Cross website that made the story in the first place.

I also emailed BBC local TV to see if they were interested.  I got the ‘it’s a bit too local to cover‘ (quote from email) response.  However if they look at the data for themselves they will see that the trends across the whole of London are sharply up.   Let’s wait and see.

Overall an interesting case study in how local data transparency can be used locally to bring some accountability to local public services and feed the mainstream traditional media.

UPDATE

Within minutes of posting this the police came back to me apologetically with a quote for the Kings Cross site and thanking me for my helpful quote in the Gazette (coincidence of timing I think).  Nonetheless they still went to the Gazette with a quote some time before me.

Ante-diluvian court processes combine with the minefield of contempt of court to make it tricky to write about local justice being done.  As a local web publisher in an area with a long, tragic history of ASB with a sizable local audience I’d like daily court results and timetables posted to a courts website, preferably with an RSS feed.  After all, you can go to the court and watch from the gallery or see the screens.  So this little noticed (by me) excerpt from a  Ministry of Justice green paper earlier this year seems wrong to me.

‘210. It is clear that there needs to be a balance between providing communities with information on court outcomes, which is in the public domain, and the need to ensure that such information is not misused. This issue is particularly pertinent because of the power of the internet to collect and make available information from a wide range of sources, and the difficulties of regulating the way in which such information is stored and reused.
211. We believe that it is not in the public interest to facilitate the creation of uncontrolled, privately held databases, and therefore intend to place the following restrictions on how information is accessed: Access to court outcomes online will require registration at level 1 of the e-Government standards66 to provide substantial assurance that the registrant’s identity has been verified. Registered users will be able to choose to see results for two courts of their choice; changing these preferences will require application to the systems administrator. Users will then be able to search all results from these two courts from the past four weeks. Information on the website will be copy protected so that it cannot be copied and pasted into other documents.
212. A prototype of the website will be made available for the duration of the Green Paper consultation.67 This will report specifically on the outcomes of knife possession cases tried in the adult magistrates’ courts, supporting the current initiative on tackling knife crime. Comments are invited on the level of security and accessibility of information. We will also look at how we can link this website to the continuing development of crime maps, to support the aim of ensuring that members of the public can get the maximum information about crime, policing and justice in a joined-up way from a linked set of sources, at as local a level as possible.’

Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice Cm 7583 April 2009, Page 81′

I appreciate the argument about long term rehabilitation and spent convictions, but this piece suggests that websites are different from newspapers, which are now almost wholly online.  If say The Times or the Islington Gazette reports an individual arrest, charge or trial in progress in the paper, it also appears online.  At no point do the articles link forward to the outcome of the trial if the subject is found innocent.  They effectively create a primitive unregulated database online.  And whilst i enjoy working with the police, even the best forces would admit they have a very long way to go to publish criminal justice outcomes in a way that reassure local people.

What do people think of this position – is it reasonable or is it out of kilter?  Is it worth lobbying to change it?  Do we think that the senior politicians who recently gathered in Downing Street to talk open data are aware of it? As it is a green paper from Ministry of Justice, this usually means that minds are open and can be influenced.

I guess i must share some blame for the Ministry of Justice position as I had worked inside the system up to that point (declaration) but i feel this doesn’t stick to the principles of the power of information work i was involved in.