Road Traffic Accidents in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Crash Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how road traffic accidents were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 257,106 de-duplicated road accident articles, and set that coverage beside 10,521 research papers and 4,217 patent families on road crashes. Six results stand out: Attention, not occurrence. Road accidents took a 44.47% smaller share of news in 2020 than in 2019. The lowest month was April 2020, at 7.05 articles per 10,000. The share has not regained its 2019 level (19.99 per 10,000 in 2019, 16.93 in 2025). No strong season. Unlike floods or heat, crash coverage is spread almost evenly. January (9.34%) and December (9.16%) are the busiest months, June (7.44%) the quietest. Geography. India's share of located road accident news is 2.09 times its share of all news. The United States, the largest source (38.42%), is under-represented at 0.79. Austria (4.2), Portugal (3.27), Kenya (2.98), Nepal (2.85) and Bangladesh (2.6) are the most over-represented of the 25 leading countries. Within India, Chhattisgarh (1.96), Uttarakhand (1.84) and Jharkhand (1.76) lead; within the United States, Connecticut (2.7), Florida (1.88) and South Carolina (1.77). Tone and urgency. 88.1% of road accident articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 82.3% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 2.32% of raw matches were law-firm marketing pages or figurative uses. One batch of such pages, published on a single day, produced a false January 2024 peak before it was excluded. Research and invention. Road crash papers grew from 1.18 to 1.7 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025 (1.44-fold). Patent families grew 2.31-fold from 2015 to 2024, and China's patent office held 69.7% of them.