Accident stats for 2020 and 2021

1

Hello,
I am trying to access accident stats via: APIs: Details - Transport for London - API

However, requesting something like: https://api.tfl.gov.uk/AccidentStats/2020
leads to a ‘BadRequest’ - similarly to 2021.

I am not sure if this is normal, and if so, was wondering when these years might get populated with data?

Many thanks

2

Welcome @Caterina_C

I can’t help wondering if the 2020 data isn’t published yet as it will may cover April 2020 to March 2021 ?

Or perhaps it’s been Covid-ed?

Or… there is some need for delay because of the pandemic?

3

I see - so then if the delay is normal and to be expected (I couldn’t find confirmation of this anywhere ‘official’ though prior to posting - might have missed it ?), this is a departure from how I’d assumed things work, i.e., that there are maybe weekly (or similar) updates appended to to the data fetched for each year

4

My memory of these stats is they are published each year, rather than being rolled out over time. I only looked at the to see if I thought they would be useful, rather than actually digging into them.

TfL are historically excellent with publishing things when they should and they are very free and fair with their data sharing.

I think it is normal practice for these kind of actuarial data set to take some time to verify and complete. It takes some time to firm a “first report” into a firm conclusions.

Of course, TfL has the world-beating budget problem and has had to cancel Crossrail 2 and the BLE projects, so it might be unable to fund the work to complete the 2020 dataset?

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5

hi @Caterina_C

Welcome!

We’ve not yet been provided the 2020 Accstats data. I’ve reached out to the product managers to ask when we should expect this.

Just as a guide, though, we didn’t get the 2019 data until December 2020.

Thanks,
James

6

Just as an aside, if it was National Statistics (as in my old job), the release date would be pre-announced.

Obviously that puts on pressure not to postpone, though that is very occasionally inevitable. My favourite (not) was finalising a release at about 2.30am in the morning, with the release due out at 10.30am. Fortunately I got on well with the guy who had to turn it into a downloadable file when he got into work that morning. At least, I did until then…

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