Methodology & Data Sources

1. Live incident reports (the map and feeds)

Live data comes from the GDELT Project (gdeltproject.org), an open research platform that monitors the world's news media in over 100 languages in near real time. Every 15 minutes we query GDELT for accident-related coverage — road, rail, aviation, maritime and industrial — from the previous 24 hours.

Each report is:

• Deduplicated — syndicated wire stories repeating across dozens of local outlets are collapsed into one entry.
• Matched to a country — by the country named in the headline first (word-boundary matching), falling back to the publisher's country. Reports we cannot place confidently are excluded from country pages and archives.
• Placed on the map when a city is named — headlines that name a city in the matched country (Lahore, Chicago, Lagos…) get a city-level dot using GeoNames coordinates; the rest stay in the country cluster.
• Linked to its original source — we never republish article content; every headline links out to the publisher.

What a map marker means: news coverage of accidents matched to that country in the last 24 hours — not a direct feed from police or emergency services. We monitor GDELT's translingual edition, which machine-translates news from 65 languages, so coverage includes local-language outlets across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East — but media coverage still skews toward severe incidents: minor accidents that never make the news anywhere cannot appear in any tracking system.

Dates are report dates: the timestamps we receive reflect when an article was published/crawled, which can differ from when the incident occurred.

2. Estimated counters (the ticking numbers)

No live global casualty feed exists — any site showing a "live" world death counter is estimating, whether it admits it or not. We admit it: every counter on this site labelled "estimated" is a statistical projection, computed as:

WHO death rate per 100,000 (per country) × population ÷ seconds in a year × seconds elapsed

Sources: the WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety (death-rate estimates per country, ~1.19 million global road deaths per year) and UN population estimates. The global counter advances at the measured average pace — roughly one death every 26 seconds. Injury counters use the WHO's 20–50 million per year range (mid estimate).

Limitations: rates are the latest WHO-published estimates, not real-time; actual national figures are revised over years, and many countries under-report road deaths. Treat all projections as indicative scale, not precise counts.

3. Emergency numbers

Compiled from publicly documented sources (including Wikipedia's list of emergency telephone numbers, EENA for Europe, and government/tourism authorities), and reviewed periodically. Numbers change; regional variations exist. Every listing carries a verify-locally note, and 112 guidance is shown because GSM mobiles connect 112 to local emergency services in most of the world. Found an error? Report it — corrections are published within 24 hours.

4. Historical archive

The history archive follows the most widely accepted records; where sources disagree significantly (unticketed passengers, wartime censorship), we show ranges rather than false precision.

5. What we never do

• Invent incidents or casualty figures — every report links to its source.
• Present estimates as confirmed counts — the "estimated" label is non-negotiable.
• Publish graphic imagery.
• Fabricate freshness — sitemap dates and archive dates are real.

6. Corrections

This site is independently researched and maintained. If you find an error — a wrong number, a mismatched report, a stale statistic — contact us with a source and we will correct it promptly and note the change.

Citations

• WHO — Global Status Report on Road Safety (latest edition): who.int
• GDELT Project — global news monitoring: gdeltproject.org
• Squawk-7700 enrichment — adsb.lol readsb traces for the flown path (current leg only, thinned to 500 points), a 350-airport table for the departure guess (first track point below 10,000 ft within 25 km of an airport) and the nearest major airport, ICAO type-code tables for the aircraft class, registration-prefix table for the country. OpenSky anonymous reads are capped at 90 per day.
• FAA National Airspace System status (nasstatus.faa.gov) — ground stops, delay programs and closures on the aviation page; adsbdb.com aircraft registry for the type and owner of aircraft squawking 7700.
• NASA EONET (open natural events) and NOAA National Hurricane Center (active tropical cyclones) — merged with GDACS into the disaster layer; an event within 60 km of a same-type GDACS alert is not shown twice.
• City crash maps — official police open data read every 6 hours: NYC, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Montgomery County (Socrata APIs); Seattle SDOT, Denver, Nashville, Washington DC (MPD), Philadelphia fatal crashes, Milwaukee, Overland Park and Virginia DOT (Richmond, Virginia Beach, Norfolk — published quarterly, labelled as such) via public ArcGIS feature services; Colorado Springs (Socrata) and Canberra (ACT Government, monthly batches); London (DfT STATS19) and Charlotte (Vision Zero fatal/serious 2024) are annual files. Added 2026-09-13: Toronto Police (injury and fatal collisions, quarterly), Halifax (monthly), Boston Vision Zero (dispatches, no severity published), Iowa DOT statewide crash data for Des Moines and Cedar Rapids (daily), Tucson Police (daily), St. Louis County Police, Vancouver WA (WSDOT reports), Virginia DOT for Arlington, Alexandria and Chesapeake (quarterly), Ventura Police, Grand Rapids, Appleton (WisDOT via East Central Wisconsin RPC), Yamagata Prefectural Police (Japan, monthly), Somerville, Gainesville (held back 60 days by Florida law) and Johns Creek Police. Where a portal publishes injury only as a yes/no flag the page counts crashes, not people; where it publishes no severity at all the page shows no injury or death numbers.
• Illinois Department of Transportation roadway incidents, WSDOT Travel Information road alerts (public ArcGIS feature services) and the City of Calgary's current traffic incidents (Socrata) — read every 15 minutes; only crash-related / incident-category items are shown, expired items are dropped.
• All of the incident feeds below are listed with their publisher, re-read interval, last successful read and live count on the live traffic incidents page; a feed whose last read failed keeps its previous records and is flagged there and on the feed-status page.
• National live-incident feeds (registry, one entry per authority): Vejdirektoratet Denmark, NDW Netherlands (DATEX II v3 safety messages), Autobahn GmbH Germany (per-motorway API), Servei Català de Trànsit, Útinform Hungary, Fintraffic Finland, Autostrade per l'Italia (motorway events; only accident, breakdown, obstacle and weather causes kept — roadworks queues and heavy traffic dropped), Trafikverket Sweden (accidents and objects or animals on the road; frost damage and roadworks dropped), National Highways England (unplanned incidents with a named cause), LTA Singapore, OHGO Ohio (crashes and flooding), the Nevada, Alaska and Connecticut 511 systems (events updated in the last 3 days), Traffic Wales, Infraestruturas de Portugal, Bison Futé France (DATEX II), Live Traffic NSW, Main Roads Western Australia, NZTA journey delays, NT Road Report, Traffic Scotland, CITA Luxembourg, KGM Türkiye, and in North America the CHP dispatch via Caltrans QuickMap, PennDOT RCRS, ADOT, the Iowa/Minnesota/Nebraska/Missouri CARS-511 mirrors, ODOT TripCheck, DriveTexas, SCDOT, Montana 511, Fort Worth Police, DelDOT, Manitoba 511 and Transports Québec — all keyless official endpoints, each read every 15–30 minutes, only accident / obstruction / closure records kept (roadworks and weight restrictions dropped), first vertex used for line geometries.
• Official traffic alerts — posts by transport authorities on Bluesky (Washington State DOT’s six regional feeds, 511 SF Bay), read every 15 minutes through the public AT Protocol API, quoted with the timestamp and linked to the original; nothing from X or Telegram (paid API / terms of service).
• Live news TV — official 24/7 news channels embedded with YouTube’s own player (nothing hosted, recorded or overlaid; the broadcaster controls embeddability); channel IDs taken from each broadcaster’s own page and matched by subscriber count; on-air status re-read from each channel’s public live page every three hours.
• Route accident history (/route-accident-history) — a route drawn by the FOSSGIS OSRM routing service on OpenStreetMap roads (requested only when a visitor asks, attribution shown) is simplified with Turf.js and matched against prepared point tiles: Great Britain STATS19 injury collisions 2021–2025 or US FARS fatal crashes 2020–2024. A crash is listed when its recorded point is within the chosen distance (100 m–1 km) of the route line, with its distance and position along the route. No safety score and no live traffic: counts depend on route length and traffic volume, which the data does not contain.
• Reader accident reports (/report-accident) — submissions and any photos or videos are stored privately and reviewed by an editor before anything is published; nothing is published automatically. Uploads are checked by content type, limited in size and number, and protected by a signed form token, a honeypot and a per-connection limit.
• Site search (/search) — an index of articles and pages rebuilt every six hours from the same data the pages use; results pages are not indexed by search engines. Weekly digest (/digest) — double opt-in email with one-click unsubscribe.
• Historical accident hotspots (/accident-hotspots) — every police-reported injury collision in Great Britain 2021–2025 from the Department for Transport's STATS19 files (Open Government Licence), prepared offline: a collision is counted once by its collision index, casualties come from the casualty table (never multiplied through vehicles), severity is the collision's STATS19 severity, road users are grouped as pedestrian, cyclist, motorcyclist, car occupant and other, and collisions recorded under council codes that were merged in 2021–2023 (North Yorkshire, Somerset, Cumbria, Sheffield/Barnsley, Heathrow) are counted in today's council. Collisions are binned into Uber H3 hexagons (about 250 km² nationally, 5 km² for the busiest-cell table, 0.7 km² inside a council). Counts are not risk: traffic volumes are not in the data.
• Road accident histories (/road/{road}/accident-history) — only where a road name matches an official field exactly: Great Britain motorways from STATS19 (first road = that motorway) and US interstates from NHTSA FARS 2020–2024 fatal crashes (route = Interstate, trafficway = that interstate). Crashes recorded under a slip road, a second road or a neighbouring road are not included. Period comparisons are yearly averages of counts, with no rate because traffic volumes are unknown.
• Accident trend comparison (/tools/accident-trends) — one definition per comparison: World Bank / WHO road death rates per 100,000 for countries (a real rate), STATS19 collision counts for Great Britain councils, FARS fatal-crash counts for US states, and each city portal's monthly recorded crashes. A rate is shown only when the dataset is a rate; otherwise counts, or an index where the first chosen period is 100.
• Crash pattern explorer on official city pages — each official city's feed is re-read once a day into a 365-day history of up to 5,000 of its most recent records. Every record keeps the source's own id (the ArcGIS object id or the Socrata row id; a person-level feed is grouped by its crash key; a hash of date, point, street and type only when a source publishes no id), the date and hour exactly as published (no time-zone conversion; an hour is dropped when every record carries the same one, which is a date shifted by a time zone), the reported point, injuries and deaths (left empty, never 0, when a source does not publish them), the collision type, the date the site first retrieved it, a revision counter when the source later edits it, and the source's own update time where it is published. Re-importing never creates a second copy of a record. A separate full-year chart comes from twelve monthly count queries against the portal, so cities that reach the record cap within weeks still show a year; months after the newest published record are marked as not yet published instead of zero. Filters (period, severity, collision type, a circle on the map) and charts count recorded crashes only — they are not a risk measure, because traffic volumes are not available, so no street or area is ranked as safe or dangerous. Page labels follow the newest record: recently reported (up to 7 days old), published with a delay (up to 120 days) or historical.
• City accident-report pages (/city/{name}) — for cities of 500,000+ people without an official open-data feed: headlines already placed on the map by the GeoNames gazetteer are assigned to the single nearest such city within 65 km, kept only when the headline carries accident vocabulary (and not a law-firm press release), and the same headline syndicated by several outlets counts once. Rebuilt hourly. A page is only offered to search engines after 3 or more reports in 30 days and is withdrawn after 60 days without one; an official-data city keeps its police map and shows these reports as a separate section.
• Road corridor pages — a named road stored as waypoints; headlines that name it (country-matched regex over the live window and 7-day archive), official incidents and geocoded reports within 12–20 km of the centreline, cameras nearest each waypoint. Same feeds as the rest of the site, cut along a road; headline counts are news mentions, not police statistics.
• Place dossiers — Wikipedia REST summaries (text, CC BY-SA 4.0, credited on each block) and Wikidata (facts, CC0) matched by ISO 3166 code, refreshed every 35 days; the header search uses Photon (komoot) and Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) with results cached for a day.
• Copernicus GloFAS river discharge forecasts via the Open-Meteo Flood API (CC BY 4.0) — 44 gauges sampled on the 0.05° grid; the outlook is the forecast 31-day peak divided by the past-31-day median and is model guidance, not an official warning.
• USGS earthquake feed (M4.5+, last 24 h), USGS Hazard Notification System (volcano aviation colour codes, coordinates from the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program), NOAA National and Pacific Tsunami Warning Centers (Atom bulletins) and NHC forecast cones — all keyless public feeds, refreshed every 15–30 minutes.
• Live traffic cameras — public snapshot and video feeds published by transport authorities (TfL JamCams, US state 511/DOT systems incl. Florida, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Utah, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, New England, Delaware, Caltrans, Ontario/Alberta/Québec 511, DriveBC, Toronto, Ottawa, DGT Spain, Taiwan Highway Bureau, ASFINAG Austria, Vegagerðin Iceland, Transport for NSW, NZTA, LTA Singapore, Hong Kong Transport Department, Fintraffic); every network has its own page under /cameras. A camera is chosen by distance to a geocoded report; the image is served by the authority, not stored here, and a camera is not necessarily pointed at the incident.
• GeoNames — city coordinates used to place reports on the map (CC BY 4.0): geonames.org
• UN World Population Prospects: population.un.org