What Happens After Someone Dies on Your Streets?

In January 2024, a father and son lost their lives when the car they were traveling in left the road and entered the Louth Canal near Tetney Lock in Lincolnshire, England. David Walsh was 40 years old. His son, Cameron, was 16.

Their deaths prompted the investigations we would expect after a fatal crash. Police gathered evidence, recorded the circumstances and worked to understand what happened. But when the case reached the coroner, another question emerged: How quickly does what we learn from a fatal crash reach the people capable of changing the street?

That question exposed a weakness in Lincolnshire’s existing process. It is the same weakness we see in communities across North America through our work with the Strong Towns Crash Analysis Studio. The problem isn’t necessarily that nobody is looking at crashes. The problem is how long it takes a government to learn from one.

Waiting for the Next Meeting

Lincolnshire already had a system for analyzing traffic crashes. Police completed collision reports, information was shared with the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership, and crash data was maintained by the County Council. Each year, that data was analyzed to identify locations where multiple collisions had occurred and where highway safety improvements might be warranted.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this approach. In fact, it will sound familiar to transportation professionals almost anywhere. We collect crash data, identify patterns, rank locations, prepare studies, prioritize projects and schedule meetings. Each step makes sense on its own.

The problem is the time between them.

In June 2025, Assistant Coroner Marianne Johnson issued a formal "Prevention of Future Deaths" report following the deaths of David and Cameron Walsh. Among the concerns she identified was the timing of Lincolnshire’s highway-safety review. Because crash locations were analyzed annually, information about a potentially dangerous condition could wait for the next review cycle before reaching the people responsible for the road. Another crash could happen in the meantime.

The coroner had identified a simple but profound problem: a process designed to eventually learn from crashes may still be too slow to prevent the next one.

This Is Not Just a Lincolnshire Problem

Lincolnshire is thousands of miles from the North American cities activating Crash Analysis Studios. The government structure, terminology and legal system are different, but the struggle is remarkably familiar.

Strong Towns is working with communities to activate a Crash Analysis Studio, and we often discover that a lot is already happening after a fatal crash. Police investigate. Public Works crews respond after the crash to maintain the street. Engineers have access to crash data. Transportation departments maintain lists of dangerous locations and developed detailed maps of high injury networks. Traffic safety committees are meeting discussing the next possible steps.

The people involved in all of these actions are committed and genuinely concerned about safety. Yet ask a simple question: “What happens tomorrow morning after someone is killed on one of your streets?” and the answer can become surprisingly difficult.

Who gets notified? Who visits the location? Who brings together what the police know with what engineers, public works staff and others know about the street? Who decides whether something should change?

And when does that happen?

If the answer is next month, next quarter, after the police investigation, during the annual crash analysis or when the next capital plan is prepared, the institution has introduced delay into a process where time matters. The next person using a dangerous street does not know that a study is underway.

The Smallest Thing We Can Do Next

The coroner’s concern prompted Lincolnshire County Council and Lincolnshire Police to reconsider their process. Their response did not involve creating a massive new bureaucracy. They changed how information moves.

A fatal collision now triggers a notification process intended to get information to the relevant highway managers. Road-safety personnel communicate with police collision investigators about potential highway-related contributing factors. Staff can review previous concerns about the location, document what they learn and consider what actions may be appropriate.

These are largely administrative changes, but administrative changes can alter how quickly a government learns. Instead of asking only what happened, the process creates an opportunity to ask another question: What is the next smallest thing we can do?

That question matters because many contributing factors identified after serious crashes can be addressed quickly and inexpensively. A pavement marking may need to be refreshed. A sign may need to move. Vegetation may be obstructing visibility. A parking space may need to be removed to improve a sightline. Signal timing or lighting may deserve another look.

Other observations may point toward something more significant: an intersection geometry that encourages dangerous speeds, a crossing that exposes people to multiple conflicts, or a street attempting to move vehicles quickly through a place where people are walking and biking. Those problems may require more investigation, funding or a larger project.

That’s okay. The first response does not need to solve everything. The first response needs to start with learning.

Investigation and Learning Are Different Jobs

A police investigation has an important purpose. Investigators may need to establish exactly what happened, determine whether laws were broken, reconstruct the sequence of events or develop evidence for legal proceedings. That work can take time.

The Crash Analysis Studio asks a different set of questions. What do we know? What don’t we know? What can we observe at the location? What conditions might have contributed to what happened? What could we investigate or test? Most importantly, what is within our control?

We do not need to establish legal fault before beginning that work. We can distinguish observations from conclusions and possible contributing factors from proven causes. Some responses may be immediate and inexpensive. Others may require additional investigation, funding, policy changes or coordination with another government agency.

The important distinction is that the investigation and the learning can happen at the same time.

A Government That Learns Faster

This is why Lincolnshire’s story matters far beyond England. The coroner did not discover that nobody cared about traffic safety. She identified a weakness in how the institution learned.

The information existed. The expertise existed. The authority to respond existed. What was missing was a reliable and timely connection between them.

That is one of the most common struggles we encounter as communities examine their existing crash-response practices, and it is precisely the kind of problem the Crash Analysis Studio is designed to address. The Studio does not replace a police investigation, require a city to establish a new department or assume that every crash has an obvious engineering solution. It establishes a habit of institutional learning.

A serious crash triggers a response. People with different responsibilities come together, examine what is known, visit the location, identify possible contributing factors and determine what actions are within their control. They document what they learned, assign the next steps and return to see whether those actions worked.

Over time, that habit changes the institution. A city stops treating each fatality simply as an event to be processed and begins treating each one as an opportunity to prevent the next tragedy.

Don’t Wait for the Next Fatality

There is an uncomfortable assumption embedded in much of our conventional approach to traffic safety: we wait for a pattern.

One death may be considered an anomaly. Another begins to attract attention. Several crashes create a statistically significant location. Eventually, the location rises high enough on a list to warrant further investigation.

That kind of analysis is useful for prioritizing limited resources across an entire transportation system. It cannot be our only response when someone dies. One tragedy is enough to ask questions.

That does not mean every fatality requires rebuilding a street or that every observation made after a crash ultimately contributed to it. It means we should be willing to look immediately and ask: What can we learn? What is within our control? What is the smallest thing we can do next?

Lincolnshire has not solved traffic safety. Its revised process will not eliminate every crash, and nothing that followed can undo the deaths of David and Cameron Walsh. What the government did was recognize that it could change the way it learns from a fatal crash without waiting for another person to die.

That is a change every community can make.

No one should have to be the second person to die on a dangerous street before we decide to learn from the first.