Motorway and A road breakdown statistics: EIR release

Information requested

Statistics on the number of vehicle breakdowns on Scottish motorways and A-roads under the Freedom of Information Act.

Please could you provide data on the points listed below for each of the following calendar years: 2023 and 2024:

- The number of breakdowns per year, per month, per day
- Which months have the most breakdowns reported
- Which day in the week do most breakdowns occur
- Geographical locations of breakdowns
- Which roads do the most breakdowns occur on

Please provide the information in an Excel spreadsheet (or similar format), broken down by month (or year if month is not possible).

Response

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

Transport Scotland has contracts in place with 4 Operating Companies and 5 Design, Build, Finance and Operate (DFBO) Concessionaires to ensure Scottish trunk roads are safe, efficient and well managed. Each of these operator's have provided details regarding the date of breakdown, route, and either the location or the eastings/northings to allow you to identify the location, for their area of responsibility.

Please see Annex A to this response for details of breakdowns including the date, time and location of the breakdown, on the Scottish Trunk Road Network for the years 2023 and 2024.

Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), Transport Scotland is not required to provide information which it does not have. Transport Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested because the information is not recorded and analysed in the format you have requested. Therefore we cannot provide the specific details you requested but have provided information to allow you to gather your own analysis. Please also note that Transport Scotland can only provide information for Scotland's trunk road network.

This exception is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in information about statistics on the number of vehicle breakdowns on Scottish motorways and A-roads, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

You may wish to contact the relevant local authorities for information regarding non-trunked roads.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR 202500475454 - Information released - Annex A

File type

Excel document

File size

1.3 MB