BBC: Decade of road deaths mapped out

With winter well and truly here and the Christmas party season in full swing, a road safety or anti drink-driving campaign may be on your news agenda.

In which case the BBC has devised a rather handy, if not a little gruesome, interactive map, which may prove an excellent source for facts and figures.

Using data between 1999 and 2008 provided by the Department of Transport, the BBC has produced the map which, by plugging in your postcode or local police authority, displays where road accidents have taken place in that area, that involve at least one fatality.

So, for example, if I wanted to know how many people died in Lancashire in 2008, I can enter my post code and see that there were 74 deaths of which – bad news fellas – 59 were male and 15 were female.

I can also see that the majority involved a car and that the largest number of deaths occurred in the group of those aged 30-59 years old.

If this is just a bit too morbid for you, you want to get into the Christmas mood, or find out if it’s likely to be safe to travel to a story location then you could try the UKSnow map.

It’s a simple app that searches Twitter for real-time snow reports and then – you guessed it – marks them on a map.

At the time of writing, the snow seems concentrated in London and the South East as well as just north of the border, in Scotland.

Anyone wishing to report snow fall can tweet with the tag #UKSnow.

(Links via Cybersoc)