Entering your postcode on a map and discovering how many fatal road accidents have happened in your area during the last decade might be a macabre and unpleasant experience, but also undeniably useful.

If this information can raise awareness about dangerous routes or specific sections of the roads, its existence will be justified.

I guess that's the idea behind an interactive map recently introduced on the BBC website: using official data recorded by police in Great Britain between 1999 and 2010, they have plotted every road collision in which someone died.

Allegedly, Britain has one of the best records in the world for road casualties. However, the fact that  36,371 people have died on UK roads in the last eleven years, is still alarming.

Things seem to be getting better, though, and in 2010 that figure was just 1,850, under half of the average from the previous 10 years.

But if we add to that number of deaths the 22,660 people seriously injured and the 184,138 who received light injuries, the reality is that we still need to improve the safety of our roads enormously.

If, like me, you live in an area where there are too many fatal crashes the map shows a black square with overall figures for the number of collisions instead of individual crash dots.

In order to see the individual incidents and their locations you need to zoom in further over the rectangle. When you do that it's easier to find cluttered orange crash dots rather than isolated ones. So, now that the problem has been spotted, it's time to fix it.

The data used to plot the map is held at the UK Data Archive and this is available to researchers via the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS).

When such an amount of data is compiled, and transferred from one database to another, it's easy to end with some inaccurate or missing information. BBC apologises in advance for any distress or offence these events may cause.