M2 recorded more serious injury collisions than M1 despite lower overall count
Northern Ireland's M2 has recorded more serious injury collisions than the M1 over the past 13 years, despite having fewer police-recorded injury crashes overall, a new comparison of PureCar's road archive has found.
The M2's mapped corridor contains 88 collisions classified as serious between 2013 and 2025. The M1 has 70. Yet the wider collision totals run in the opposite direction: 1,483 around the M2, against 1,611 around the M1.
That is not a claim that the M2 is the more dangerous motorway. It is a finding about what happens when a familiar measure — the number of crashes — is put alongside the consequences of those crashes. On the two routes, the rankings change.
PureCar's linked casualty records reinforce the difference. The selected M2 area contains 102 people recorded as seriously injured, compared with 88 on the M1. The M1, meanwhile, has the worse fatal record in these selected areas: ten fatal-severity collisions and ten deaths, compared with five fatal collisions and five deaths near the M2. A single all-purpose ranking would obscure both sides of that comparison.
The distinction has immediate relevance to how Northern Ireland assesses its busiest road connections. If attention is directed only towards the routes with the most recorded crashes, a different pattern of serious injury can go unnoticed. If attention is directed only towards fatal crashes, the order changes again.
Two motorways, two different records
On the M2, 88 of 1,483 recorded injury collisions were classified as serious — approximately 5.9%. On the M1, 70 of 1,611 were serious, about 4.3%. Those are proportions of collisions in each mapped selection, not the probability of a motorist being injured on a journey.
The M2 also recorded fewer casualty entries overall: 2,517, compared with 2,676 around the M1. But the serious-injury counts again point in the opposite direction. The M2 had 14 more seriously injured people in the linked records despite having 159 fewer casualties of all severities.
Nor is the comparison confined to the latest year. In 2018, the mapped M2 recorded 143 injury collisions and the M1 recorded 141 — almost identical totals. By 2025, the M2 stood at 101 and the M1 at 131. The routes had moved apart, particularly as the M1 registered an increase from 104 in 2024 to 131 in 2025. The M2 rose more modestly, from 95 to 101.
PureCar has already reported the M1's 2025 increase. The separate discovery here is what the two archives reveal when their serious-injury and fatal-collision histories are considered together. The M1's recent rise and greater fatal-collision count do not cancel the higher number of serious-severity collisions recorded around the M2 over the full period.
Why a single league table fails
The contrast matters because road-safety decisions have different objectives. An intervention designed to prevent a fatal collision may address a different set of circumstances from one intended to reduce repeated serious injuries. A raw crash count cannot reveal whether either objective is being met.
The historical files do not, by themselves, identify which junction designs, driver behaviours or traffic conditions produced the difference. They also contain no comparable figure for the number of vehicles travelling each route, the miles driven, or the time those vehicles spent on it. Those are essential before calculating a meaningful comparative risk of serious injury.
The two investigations cover different mapped footprints — 94 road sections for the M1 and 67 for the M2. PureCar includes police-reported injury collisions within 100 metres of those sections. Nearby slip roads, junctions and adjoining streets can therefore contribute; not every incident should be presented as a crash on a motorway's main carriageway. It would also be wrong to add the two totals together and assume that no individual collision could appear in more than one mapped selection.
Those limits do not erase the finding. They define the question that now deserves a closer answer: what explains the M2's higher serious-collision tally, and where within the selected road network were those incidents concentrated?
For the Department for Infrastructure and road-safety authorities, the next useful evidence would be a motorway-specific analysis of the actual collision locations, vehicle movements, traffic exposure and injury outcomes. That would distinguish incidents on the main carriageways from those at junctions or nearby roads — and allow the serious-injury comparison to be tested on a like-for-like basis.
For now, the records show why Northern Ireland cannot judge two major roads by crash volume alone. Over 13 years, the M1 has the higher total and the heavier fatal toll in these mapped areas. The M2 has more serious-severity collisions and more people seriously injured. All four facts are part of the same road-safety record.
