Many of us will know of someone who has been killed or injured in a road crash. Last year 2,538 people were killed on Britain's roads. Even though that figure has come down substantially in the past decade, road crashes are still the largest single cause of accidental death for people between the ages of five and 35-years-old. Yet all this seems to be something which society as a whole rarely questions.
In a special series this week, we look at what has been done to tackle the problem, what more could be done, and describe the impact on those involved.
We have also taken a close look at all the detailed data we could find, and this provides a powerful way to tell the story, as Bella Hurrell, who runs the News website special projects team, explains:
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By Bella Hurrell
"As part of the coverage of road deaths this week, one of our challenges was how to make the issue feel relevant to people.
The web is great at providing an extra level of depth, for those that want it, and so an interactive map enabling readers to see fatal crashes in their police authority area over the past decade looked like an effective way to help show the enormity of the problem.
As far as we know this is the first time that 10 years of government road fatality data has been made public and mapped so we can all see it.
Each crash is mapped to the location where it occurred and many data points include links through to local newspaper reports about the crash.
The map helps to refocus the issue away from being a national problem involving big numbers to being a local issue, affecting people we may know, on roads we might travel.
Mapping data can be tricky though and our solution isn't perfect. Over 10 years there have been more than 32,000 fatal crashes and it would be almost impossible to display all this on one map at once, so we have split up the data into individual years and then again into police authorities so that it downloads more easily.
The data is displayed by police authority as this is how it is recorded, rather than by the unit of county or local authority, with which people are generally more familiar. All this means that some of you won't see the data exactly as you might want it.
Thousands of you have been looking at the map - and thank you for all your feedback. If you found the map a useful way of covering the issue you might want also want to look at this interactive graphic which charts the worst times of day for fatalities by indicators like age and day of the week.
There will be more coverage from our special report on road crashes on Thursday and Friday."
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Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website