Where Kent & Medway Keep Crashing: 18,400 Collisions, 24,390 Casualties and 252 Deaths Mapped

Every dot on our map marks a journey in Kent or Medway which ended with somebody being injured.

Between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025, police recorded 18,400 personal-injury road collisions across Kent and Medway. They involved 34,194 vehicles and 24,390 casualties. Of those casualties, 252 people were killed, 4,418 were seriously injured and 19,720 sustained slight injuries.

Put those numbers into human terms and the scale becomes harder to ignore. Across the 1,826 days covered by the data, Kent and Medway averaged just over 10 injury collisions and 13 casualties every day. On average, somebody was killed on the roads roughly once every seven days.

These figures come from the Department for Transport’s STATS19 open data. They do NOT represent every bump, shunt or damage-only crash. The system records personal-injury collisions on public roads which are reported to the police and subsequently recorded. The latest five-year files contain final validated data through 2025.

Kent & Medway Road Collisions 2021-2025 – Google My Maps

Interactive map of 18,400 police-reported personal-injury road collisions across Kent and Medway between 2021 and 2025, using Department for Transport STATS19 data. Each marker represents one collision and shows the date, severity, district, number of vehicles involved and recorded casualties. Marker colours distinguish the year of the collision.

Our interactive map contains all 18,400 Kent and Medway collisions in the five-year dataset. The markers are coloured by year. Click a marker to see when and where the collision happened, its recorded severity and the numbers of vehicles and casualties involved.

There is an important distinction between a map of collisions and a map of danger. Raw numbers are affected by population, traffic volumes, road mileage and the types of roads running through an area. So the figures below tell us where the greatest recorded burden occurred; they do not prove that somebody making the same journey is more likely to crash in one district than another.

And yet some patterns are impossible to miss.

Medway stands apart

Across the five years, Medway recorded more collisions than anywhere else: 2,466, involving 4,514 vehicles and 3,172 casualties.

It wasn’t a one-year spike. Medway recorded the highest number of collisions, vehicles and casualties in every one of the five years examined.

At the other end of the table sits Folkestone and Hythe, with the lowest five-year totals on all three measures: 1,007 collisions, 1,807 vehicles and 1,304 casualties.

In raw terms, Medway therefore recorded roughly two-and-a-half times as many collisions, vehicles and casualties as Folkestone and Hythe.

But the place with the most collisions wasn’t necessarily the place where the consequences were most severe.

Ashford breaks the pattern

Ashford recorded 1,330 collisions, putting it only eighth of the 13 Kent and Medway local-authority areas by collision numbers.

Yet 31 people were killed in Ashford collisions — more than in any other district.

Maidstone recorded 27 fatalities, while Medway and Sevenoaks each recorded 23.

Ashford also recorded 1,862 casualties from its 1,330 collisions — 1.40 casualties per collision, the highest ratio among the 13 areas.

Looking instead at people killed or seriously injured produces another picture. There were 4,670 KSI casualties across Kent and Medway: almost one in every five casualties in the entire dataset.

Medway had the largest number, with 574 killed or seriously injured, followed by Maidstone with 423 and Swale with 411. Gravesham had the lowest raw KSI total, at 234.

These are precisely the distinctions which disappear if “collisions”, “vehicles” and “casualties” are treated as interchangeable numbers.

They aren’t.

34,194 vehicles — and Dartford stands out

Medway again had the largest raw vehicle total, with 4,514 vehicles involved in its 2,466 collisions. Folkestone and Hythe recorded the fewest, at 1,807.

But Dartford shows why looking beyond the headline total matters.

Its 1,586 collisions involved 3,217 vehicles, an average of 2.03 vehicles per collision, the highest figure among the 13 areas. More than 80% of Dartford’s recorded injury collisions involved at least two vehicles.

That doesn’t establish why. It does identify something worth asking about.

One road dominates the numbered routes

Among identifiable numbered roads, one route stands considerably above the rest.

The A2 accounted for 1,211 recorded collisions, involving 2,467 vehicles and 1,659 casualties. Twenty-one people were killed in those collisions.

The next highest numbered route was the A28, with 546 collisions, followed by the A20 with 524. In other words, the A2 recorded more than twice as many collisions as the A28.

Again, traffic volume and the length of road within Kent and Medway matter enormously. This is not a collision rate per mile travelled. But as a measure of where casualties and collisions physically accumulated, the A2 is difficult to overlook.

Closer to home, the A259 was the leading numbered road within Folkestone and Hythe, with 222 collisions, 413 vehicles and 309 casualties over the five years. Four people were killed and 53 were seriously injured.

The rural-road finding is perhaps the starkest

The geographical split contains one of the most striking findings in all three datasets.

Kent and Medway recorded 9,569 urban collisions and 8,831 rural collisions. So rural roads accounted for just under 48% of collisions.

Yet 172 of the 252 fatalities occurred in rural collisions.

That is 68% of all deaths.

Put another way, fewer than half the recorded injury collisions occurred on roads classified as rural, but more than two-thirds of the people killed died there.

Speed-limit data point in a similar direction. Roads with 60mph or 70mph limits accounted for about a quarter of all collisions — 4,533 of 18,400 — but 125 of the 252 fatalities, almost half.

Neither finding proves that speed caused those deaths. Road design, traffic mix, journey distance, vehicle type, emergency response and numerous other factors can matter. The public open-data files also do not contain all the sensitive contributory information collected by police.

But it tells us where further questions belong.

The five-year direction is down — but 2025 turned upwards

The busiest year in the dataset was 2022, when Kent and Medway recorded 3,983 collisions, 7,364 vehicles and 5,300 casualties.

By 2024 those numbers had fallen to 3,344 collisions, 6,252 vehicles and 4,391 casualties.

Then the direction changed slightly.

In 2025 there were 3,417 collisions, 6,340 vehicles and 4,452 casualties — increases of 2.2%, 1.4% and 1.4% respectively on 2024.

Across the longer 2021-to-2025 comparison, collisions were still down 9.1%, vehicles down 9.7% and casualties down 10.4%.

But one district bucked that direction completely.

Ashford was the only Kent or Medway district where all three measures were higher in 2025 than in 2021: collisions rose 3.2%, vehicles 4.4% and casualties 5.0%.

At the opposite extreme was Gravesham, where collisions fell 27%, vehicles 26% and casualties 24%.

Why those two places travelled in such different directions cannot be answered by the spreadsheets alone.

That is where the journalism begins.

The map tells us where to look: the persistent volume in Medway; the fatalities in Ashford; the A2 corridor; Dartford’s unusually high proportion of multi-vehicle collisions; the concentration of deaths on rural roads; and, locally, those 222 injury collisions along the A259.

Behind all 18,400 dots is something the spreadsheet cannot record: an ambulance journey, a knock on a door, weeks or months of recovery — and, 252 times, somebody who never came home.

The numbers are the beginning of the story. The people represented by them are the reason it matters.

The Shepway Vox Team

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