Prevention of pedestrian accidents.

Child pedestrian accidents are the most common road traffic accident resulting in injury. Much of the existing work on road traffic accidents is based on analysing clusters of accidents despite evidence that child pedestrian accidents tend to be more dispersed than this. This paper analyses pedestrian accidents in 573 children aged 0-11 years by a locally derived deprivation score for the years 1988-90. The analysis shows a significantly higher accident rate in deprived areas and a dose response relationship between degree of deprivation and accident rates. At the level of individual deprivation zones a strong correlation between accident rates and the degree of deprivation has been demonstrated. It is suggested that area wide engineering and educational schemes should be targeted at areas with high accident rates. Environmental improvements based on analysis of clusters of accidents may not be the most suitable method for reducing child pedestrian accidents.