Pedestrians were 19% of NI’s worst road casualties — but 7.7% of all casualties
PureCar original analysis | 23 October 2026. The contrast in Northern Ireland’s 2025 figures reveals why pedestrian safety cannot be assessed through casualty totals alone. This report separates recorded evidence from analysis, so readers can understand not only the headline but also the limits of the data.
A disproportionate share of severe harm
The PSNI reported that pedestrians represented 19.0% of killed or seriously injured casualties in 2025, although they accounted for 7.7% of all road casualties. Those shares describe the makeup of recorded casualty groups, not an individual pedestrian’s probability of being struck. Even so, the gap is important: the pedestrian share of the most serious outcomes was substantially greater than the share of casualties overall.
What the comparison tells us
A dashboard that displays only the number of people injured can obscure the severity profile for different users. Drivers, passengers, cyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists do not experience collisions in the same way. If a local area has fewer pedestrian crashes but a concentration of serious injuries, it deserves attention that an all-casualty league table might miss. That is a reason to examine severity in street-level analysis.
Where investigations should look
The most useful follow-up is local evidence: crossing points, junction geometry, speed environment, lighting, pedestrian desire lines and where police-recorded injury collisions occurred. It is not enough to describe an entire town centre as dangerous because a handful of cases appear nearby. Locations need to be checked, periods clearly stated and exposure understood where possible before suggesting specific design changes.
What would make the next update more useful
Future reporting should separate pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries, age groups and the urban or rural setting. It should also review whether recorded junction or crossing changes are associated with sustained improvement rather than relying on anecdote. For now, the 2025 breakdown is a warning against equating every casualty with the same level of harm, and a reason to include pedestrians explicitly in road safety debates.
The exposure-adjusted figure is more revealing
The PSNI reports pedestrians accounted for 19.0% of people killed or seriously injured in 2025, despite representing 7.7% of all reported casualties. That disparity is a proportion-of-casualties comparison: it does not reveal how often a pedestrian is injured on a particular journey.
The Department for Infrastructure publishes a different measure that does use distance travelled. Its 2025 strategy report gives approximately 41 pedestrian KSI casualties per 100 million kilometres walked, compared with 4 per 100 million kilometres travelled by car or van. Motorcyclists had a rate of 344 per 100 million kilometres and pedal cyclists 63. Different modes have different trip characteristics and data limitations; the figures should not be converted into guarantees for an individual.
For councils, a productive investigation would combine this wider vulnerability evidence with collision locations, pedestrian counts, crossing wait times, lighting and turning movements. An annual headline percentage alone cannot identify which Belfast crossing needs redesign first.
About the evidence
This PureCar analysis uses officially published PSNI and Northern Ireland departmental statistics. The police series covers injury road traffic collisions reported to police; it does not capture every non-injury bump, near miss or unreported incident. A collision is an event and a casualty is a person, so the two totals must not be used interchangeably. The figures are historical and do not indicate conditions on any route right now.
What the figures cannot prove
A higher count in a place or group does not, by itself, establish greater risk per vehicle journey, per mile travelled or per person. The appropriate denominator and road-user exposure data would be required for that conclusion. Nor can the published summary alone establish responsibility for individual incidents. Where this article raises questions about infrastructure, enforcement or road-user behaviour, those are reporting questions unless a cited source confirms an answer.
Explore the underlying information
For local road context, see PureCar’s Northern Ireland road safety reports. For present-day road disruption, use PureCar traffic information. The PSNI road collision statistics library contains the official statistical series and supporting files. Figures can be revised by data owners; for definitive tables and definitions readers should check the official publications directly.
Sources and verification
Additional source: Official statistical evidence for the comparisons above.
