Tullyvar Road crash totals stand still as serious collisions rise from zero to three

The A5 near Tullyvar Road recorded exactly the same number of injury collisions in 2025 as it did in 2024. But the two years were far from identical for the people caught up in them.

There were nine police-recorded injury crashes in each year within the mapped Tullyvar corridor. All nine in 2024 were classified as slight. Three of the nine in 2025 were classified as serious. A headline count suggesting no change conceals a marked deterioration in the recorded severity of the latest year's incidents.

A closer examination of the same archive uncovers an even more consequential finding. A fatal collision recorded within the selected area on 27 April 2023 involved two vehicle records and eight casualty records. Three of those people were recorded as fatally injured, two as seriously injured and three as slightly injured. It was a single collision, but it accounted for three of the five fatalities recorded across the entire 13-year mapped Tullyvar selection.

That collision happened in 2023; it is not a new crash report. Its significance emerges from placing the individual record alongside the full 2013–2025 series. Across those 13 years, the selected corridor has 102 police-recorded injury collisions, three classified as fatal. Together, those fatal collisions resulted in five recorded deaths.

In other words, one collision contributed 60% of the deaths in the corridor's entire historical casualty record. That is a profound concentration of harm which a graph of annual crash counts simply cannot show.

The nine crashes that were not a repeat year

The latest comparison is equally important, although it concerns serious injury rather than death. In 2024, the nine incidents were all slight-severity collisions. In 2025, six were slight and three serious. It would be misleading to describe the latter three as three seriously injured people; a serious collision can involve more than one casualty. The classification describes the collision's worst recorded injury severity.

That change means one third of the 2025 collisions were in the serious category, compared with none the previous year. The number of reported injury crashes did not rise, yet the more severe classification became much more prominent.

The longer history provides a sobering backdrop. The corridor had 12 injury collisions in 2019, its highest annual total during the period. It recorded five in 2023, nine in 2024 and nine again in 2025. There were three fatal-severity collisions and nine serious-severity collisions across the whole 13 years, with five deaths, 12 people seriously injured and 143 slightly injured. Those counts concern people and accidents within the same archive and must not be stacked together as separate events.

The 2023 collision record is unusually revealing because it connects one event with the number and severity of its casualties. It does not establish the circumstances of the collision, blame, the vehicles' movements or the identity of those involved. There is no evidence in that statistical entry to justify inventing a sequence of events or attaching a supposed cause.

Nor does the area count prove that the Tullyvar Road carriageway itself was the site of every incident. PureCar's investigation includes five DfI mapped sections and searches within 100 metres of their recorded alignment. Some collisions may have occurred at a junction or on an adjoining road. The five-death figure belongs to that selected geographical area, not to the entire A5.

The question hidden behind a steady total

The western road network is frequently discussed in terms of large infrastructure decisions, including the future of the A5. This much smaller section of the record supplies a different kind of evidence. It shows why the severity of individual collisions matters even when the yearly count is unchanged.

A follow-up investigation should start with the three serious cases in 2025: where precisely were they recorded, what road users were involved and whether any features recur. The police dataset can identify them as individual records; it cannot, without further engineering and collision-investigation evidence, answer whether a particular layout or behaviour explains them.

That is not an excuse to treat the finding as inconclusive. It is a reason to ask for a specific review rather than a general promise to improve road safety. Transport officials can be asked whether the three 2025 cases have been examined together and how the 2023 multi-fatality collision has informed the assessment of this part of the network.

The numbers nine and nine may appear unremarkable. Read beside the casualty records, they are not. One historic crash accounted for three lives lost, and the most recent year brought three serious-severity collisions after a year without any in that category. Those are the findings that warrant scrutiny.