Mid Ulster recorded nine road deaths in 2025 while Derry and Strabane recorded none

Official 2025 figures show sharply different fatality counts between Northern Ireland council areas. The contrast is worth examining, but raw totals are not a league table of road risk.

What the official figures say

Nine people died in road traffic collisions in Mid Ulster during calendar year 2025, the highest district total reported in the Northern Ireland Road Safety Strategy statistics. Derry City and Strabane recorded no road deaths that year. The same release reported 56 road fatalities across Northern Ireland overall.

Those numbers describe recorded deaths during one calendar year. They do not mean that every road in Mid Ulster is dangerous or that Derry City and Strabane have no dangerous roads. A district can record zero fatalities in one year and still experience injury collisions, while a district with a higher count may have a larger population, more traffic, longer rural journeys or a different mix of road types.

That is why these figures should be read as a starting point for analysis rather than a simple ranking. Fatality counts are important measures of the human consequences of collisions, but they are statistically volatile at district level, where a small number of events can move the annual total substantially.

Why district totals need context

Council boundaries are administrative lines, not necessarily the boundaries drivers use when planning a journey. A long cross-district journey can pass through several road environments, and a collision is assigned to a location rather than to every area through which the journey travelled.

The number of deaths alone also leaves out the number of people who were seriously or slightly injured. A district with no deaths may still have substantial casualty numbers. Conversely, a district with a fatality may have fewer total injury collisions than a more populated urban area.

Fair comparisons need several indicators beside one another: deaths, killed or seriously injured casualties, all casualties, injury collisions, population and, where possible, traffic or distance-travelled measures. Each answers a different question. Population rates improve one comparison, but they still do not measure the risk of an individual journey as well as reliable traffic-exposure data could.

The Belfast comparison matters too

The official calendar-year release also identifies Belfast City as the district with the highest number of people killed or seriously injured, with 180 KSI casualties reported in the NISRA summary. That measure includes people who survived with serious injuries as well as those who died, so it must not be treated as a fatality count.

This difference is precisely why district reports should separate fatal collisions, fatalities, serious injuries and the wider killed-or-seriously-injured group. Using one measure as a substitute for another can make two areas look comparable when the outcomes being counted are different.

Figures can also differ between a detailed table and a short summary if one refers to KSI casualties and another to people seriously injured alone. PureCar should retain the official table label in charts and headlines and document the reporting period beside each figure.

What PureCar can test next

The next step is a district-by-district audit of PureCar’s imported collision and casualty files against the official PSNI tables. It should verify each incident’s district assignment, check for missing or invalid locations, and distinguish the collision count from the number of people injured or killed.

A properly checked map could then show where fatal collisions occurred alongside serious-injury totals. The analysis should explain how the districts were assigned and whether the records with uncertain coordinates were excluded. It should not label individual roads as dangerous merely because they appear in a district with a higher annual total.

If traffic counts can be matched to the same road network and comparable period, PureCar could go further by assessing whether observed counts differ from what traffic exposure alone might suggest. Until that work is complete, the responsible finding is that the district totals differ—not that one district is inherently more dangerous than another.

What motorists should take from this

For drivers, the district figures are a reminder that fatal collisions occur across a varied road network and that a local annual total does not predict the safety of a particular journey. The useful response is to pay attention to the conditions on the road in front of you, allow time for decisions, and adapt speed to visibility, road layout and traffic.

For readers and policymakers, the more important question is whether recurring patterns appear when the full set of collision circumstances is checked. PureCar’s contribution should be a transparent analysis that lets readers see both what the numbers establish and what remains unknown.

Sources and methodology

This report uses the published 2025 calendar-year road casualty summary from NISRA and PSNI. It reports the district totals as published and does not estimate district-level risk. The detailed records must be reconciled before producing a finer geographic breakdown.

Police-recorded injury collision statistics do not represent every damage-only incident, near miss or collision that was never reported to police. A zero fatality count is therefore not the same as a zero-collision count, and it should never be described that way.