Although a great deal of information about road safety already exists, we still need to find out more about why there are so many road casualties in the areas that NRSI covers. Finding out more about why these incidents happen will help us to reduce their numbers and save people from being killed or injured.

The NRSI team will do some of the work. In addition, there is an evaluation team made up of experienced researchers in the field. We also hope to involve other experts, possibly from universities and colleges in the North West.

The research will look beyond the statistics to seek the real reasons why ?accidents? happen - they are rarely purely accidental & there is usually some underlying cause. The NRSI team has access to detailed data on accidents reported to the police and to the original police files. We hope that a systematic examination of a sample of these records will throw more light on what happened in each case. Extra knowledge should lead to more effective intervention.

We also want to try and answer some specific questions, for example -

? Why younger boys are much more likely to be casualties than girls, & why this changes for teenagers, when more girls are injured.

? Why there are lots of incidents involving very young children in some places.

? What are the issues affecting the different minority ethnic communities in the North West.

Each individual local authority will be undertaking projects in its target areas. Some of these will be physical engineering measures such as traffic calming, others involve improving local play facilities to keep children off the streets & some will involve working with local people to try & identify what might work in individual neighbourhoods.

All these projects will be monitored to see if they reduce the numbers of incidents or bring other benefits such as reduced traffic speeds. From this we hope to learn about what is effective and what is not, so that this can be applied in other places.

The evaluation team mentioned above includes experienced researchers from various universities. They will be looking at a number of topics. They will seek to find out if the record of accidents collected by the police is a complete one, or if there are significant numbers not reported to the police, as has been found elsewhere.

The team will also be carrying out questionnaire studies in schools and local communities. From these studies, we hope to find out more about people?s journey patterns, especially what children are doing when they are out on the streets. They will also ask people for their views about their neighbourhoods & how safe they are. By doing these studies before & after the NRSI initiative, we hope to be able to find out what impact it has had.