Story · Transport map · about 4 min
Britain's roads: busy, quiet and dangerous
The Department for Transport counts, and estimates, how many vehicles use each stretch of motorway and A road on an average day, and the police record every collision in which someone is hurt. This story follows the traffic through the first COVID-19 lockdown and back, then looks at where the collisions of 2025 happened.
2019: the last normal year
The map colours every motorway and A road by vehicles a day: pale yellow is quiet, dark red is very busy. In 2019 the busiest stretch was the M25 in Hillingdon, with 216,108 vehicles a day. Follow the dark red lines: the M25, the M6, the M1 and the roads into Manchester and Birmingham.
2020: the roads go quiet
In 2020 the first lockdown began. Across the same 17,941 road segments, average traffic in 2020 was 77% of the 2019 level, about 23% lower. Compare the colours with the last step: many stretches drop a shade. Click any road to draw its own history.
2025: back to where it was
Traffic came back slowly: 86% of the 2019 level in 2021, and 99% by 2025. Around London the dark red is back. One caution: only about a quarter of these figures are direct counts; the rest are estimates the Department for Transport makes from nearby counts and trends, so read single roads with care.
101,523 collisions in 2025
The police recorded 101,523 collisions in Great Britain in 2025 in which someone was hurt: 1,453 killed at least one person and 25,190 more were classed as serious. Each dot is one collision, dark red for the fatal ones.
Most happen on town streets
69% of them were on roads with a limit of 30 mph or less: ordinary streets in towns and cities, where people walk, cycle and cross. Only 9% involved three or more vehicles.
The deaths are on fast country roads
Roads with a 60 mph limit, the national limit on single-carriageway roads, had 13% of the collisions but 32% of the fatal ones. A collision there was about 4 times as likely to kill someone as one on a 30 mph street. Only the fatal collisions are shown here, over the traffic on each road.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- What does a sudden change in traffic tell you about how people live and work?
- Why might most collisions happen on slow streets, but a large share of the deaths on faster roads?
Try it on the map: Zoom into your own town. Where do the dark red (fatal) dots fall compared with the pale ones?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.