Belfast accounted for more than one in five NI injury collisions in 2025
PureCar’s analysis of police-recorded data puts 1,132 injury collisions in Belfast in 2025, or 22.6% of Northern Ireland’s total. The figure is a count, not a measure of risk per journey.
Belfast’s share of the Northern Ireland total
Belfast accounted for 1,132 police-recorded injury road collisions in 2025, according to district figures displayed in PureCar’s Northern Ireland Road Collision and Safety Explorer. That is approximately 22.6% of the 5,015 injury collisions recorded across Northern Ireland during the same calendar year. Put another way, slightly more than one in five injury collisions in the regional dataset was recorded within the Belfast district.
The total is substantially higher than the next two districts in PureCar’s published table: Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon recorded 554, while Newry, Mourne and Down recorded 491. Together, those two districts recorded 1,045 injury collisions, 87 fewer than Belfast. Those comparisons use police-recorded injury collisions in calendar 2025, not casualty totals, deaths or reports of damage-only crashes.
The question the headline cannot answer
Belfast has a large concentration of jobs, services, hospitals, shops and education, as well as people commuting through the city from outside its council boundaries. An absolute collision count cannot tell a reader whether a journey in Belfast is more dangerous than one elsewhere. That requires a suitable comparison of traffic volume, distance travelled, road layout, transport mode and exposure.
Nor can a district-wide total reveal which street or junction should be investigated first. Injury collisions may involve one or several people; a high collision count and a high killed-or-seriously-injured count are related but distinct measures. PureCar’s records explorer enables road-level examination, but site-specific claims still need location and mapping checks.
How Belfast compares with the rest of the region
On the same published 2025 district table, Lisburn and Castlereagh recorded 426 injury collisions and Antrim and Newtownabbey recorded 417. Belfast’s 1,132 is almost twice the Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon number, but it would be misleading to turn that ratio into a statement that a Belfast motorist is almost twice as likely to crash.
The regional total was 262 collisions higher than in 2024, when the PSNI recorded 4,753 injury collisions. That is an increase of about 5.5% across Northern Ireland. The comparison does not establish how Belfast’s own injury-collision count changed between those years; that would need a consistent district-level 2024 comparator.
What further local scrutiny would establish
A useful next investigation would break the Belfast figure into the same mapped roads and junctions over several years, compare the severity of the injuries, and examine any roadworks or permanent layout changes before and after the recorded incidents. Traffic counts are needed before calculating genuine risk rates.
PureCar’s road-safety hub already identifies historical collision locations and individual records. Those records can support a targeted review of repeated injury sites, but they are not a substitute for a formal engineering safety audit. This report is a newly compiled interpretation of historical official data, not evidence of a newly occurring collision or a live road alert.
Sources and methodology
This report is based on police-recorded injury collision statistics and the linked PureCar road-safety dataset. Figures describe historical recorded incidents, not live traffic hazards. A collision is one event; casualties are people injured or killed in that event. Statistical classifications and mapped-corridor boundaries are explained in the cited source pages.
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