All datasets › Safety
Road Traffic Accidents in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of road accident news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about a road traffic crash or road safety, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
Road traffic accidents took a 44.47% smaller share of global news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (11.1 against 19.99 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025; 2020 was the year of the first COVID-19 lockdowns.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 257,106 matched articles January 2019 – July 2026.
April 2020, the month of the first COVID-19 lockdowns, was the month in which road accidents took their smallest share of global news between January 2019 and December 2025, at 7.05 articles per 10,000, against a high of 22.85 in December 2024.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to December 2025 (2026 omitted because the index thins after May 2026).
Unlike seasonal hazards, road accident coverage in a global news index was spread almost evenly through the year between 2019 and 2025: the busiest months, January (9.34%) and December (9.16%), together held 18.5% of a typical year's coverage, and the quietest, June, held 7.44%.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Of road accident articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 88.1% were negative in tone, 2.62 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.7% of sampled articles carry a label.
Machine-assigned priority ratings placed 82.3% of road accident articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.93 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 25,446 | 38.42% | 0.79 |
| India | 18,287 | 27.61% | 2.09 |
| United Kingdom | 3,381 | 5.1% | 0.87 |
| Australia | 1,300 | 1.96% | 0.92 |
| Germany | 1,282 | 1.94% | 1.65 |
| Nigeria | 975 | 1.47% | 1.07 |
| Japan | 866 | 1.31% | 1.23 |
| Ireland | 850 | 1.28% | 1.78 |
| France | 669 | 1.01% | 0.51 |
| Canada | 662 | 1.0% | 0.47 |
| Austria | 654 | 0.99% | 4.2 |
| Brazil | 563 | 0.85% | 0.98 |
| Spain | 561 | 0.85% | 0.87 |
| Italy | 508 | 0.77% | 0.79 |
| Ghana | 466 | 0.7% | 1.46 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "road accident" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Road Traffic Accidents in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/road-accidents/