We may top the world road safety league but more could be done according to the Road Safety Foundation. With UK annual road deaths now at a record low of sub-2000, the Foundation argues that a further 6000 lives could be saved over the next decade at a cost of less than 10% of existing road maintenance budgets. The only trouble with that is where are local road authorities going to find the cash without affecting road repairs further?
The Foundation states by upgrading one and two star roads to better safety standards, the benefits to the UK economy would be in the region of £25 to £35bn, and the cost can be found through efficiency savings and sharing of best practice with other countries such as Sweden. Currently, UK PLC loses nearly £30bn a year through road crashes. The cost of each road death in the UK is estimated to be £1.79m according to the Institute of Advanced Motorists.
Last year, the Foundation completed inspecting 95% of the 4400 miles of roads covered by the Highways Agency and, using the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP) system to assess the safety of roads, awarded two stars to two-thirds of the road network assessed. The maximum possible score under the EuroRAP Road Protection Score is four stars!
The EuroRAP score assesses roads on how well their design protects users from death or disabling injury in the event of an accident. Three key elements are considered: protection if a vehicle runs off the road, risk of a head-on collision and safety of junctions. In the UK, half of the motorways under the Highways Agency’s control achieved a four-star rating while 78% of dual-carriageways were given a three-star rating.
However, half of motorways do not protect users if they run off the road while on dual-carriageways the figure is 90 per cent. Nearly 100% however do offer protection against head-on collisions, which is stating the obvious!
Single carriageways lacked the most safety features, 62% rated two stars. It is mainly these types of roads the Foundation is presumably targeting.
Meanwhile, Thames Valley Police is switching back on 72 fixed and 89 mobile sites in Oxfordshire that it switched off last August. In the subsequent six months, 50% more people were killed at the county’s fixed camera sites than during the same period the year before. Speeding had also increased through these sites.
Again the Road Safety Foundation estimates fixed speed camera sites saves up to 800 deaths and serious injuries.
The move to switch back on fixed speed cameras at known accident hot spots must be welcomed. Now the Foundation needs to sharpen its pencil to demonstrate precisely the kinds of savings that can be achieved through the sharing of best practice on road safety engineering. In so doing, it needs to show the long-term benefits clearly so that road safety engineering can command a greater slice of local authority highways budgets compared to other safety works evaluated on a one year return on investment basis.
Against a backdrop of road safety cuts, I wish the Foundation’s Saving Lives, Saving Money campaign all the luck but fear it occupying a back street in the current ‘slash and burn’ climate.
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