Britain’s most dangerous roads: what the collision data shows

Ranking roads by the number of collisions mostly produces a list of the busiest roads. The M1 records hundreds of reported collisions a year, but it also carries more than six billion vehicle miles.

A fairer measure divides collisions by traffic. We combine police-reported collisions (STATS19) with the Department for Transport’s traffic estimates to give a rate per 100 million vehicle miles, for each road and for each section of it.

Motorways are the safest roads per mile

Per mile driven, motorways have the lowest collision rates of any road type. Rural single-carriageway A-roads have some of the highest rates of fatal and serious collisions, because of higher speeds, bends, junctions and the lack of a central barrier.

What the M1 figures show

On the M1 in 2025 there were 612 reported collisions, 86 of them fatal or serious. That is fewer than before 2020, even though traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels.

The limits of the data

STATS19 only covers collisions that police attended or were told about. Many slight injury collisions are never reported. We publish rates only where a road section has enough traffic count points and at least five years of collision data. The methodology explains the matching.