The bar should be lifted for the UK and other northern European countries with relatively good records in cutting casualties by the proposed new European Directive, according to road safety charity EuroRap.
EuroRap is set to tell the European Commission that while it is worthwhile to encourage the EU’s laggards to emulate best practice on the Continent, further improvements are still needed in northern Europe. The commission is consulting on promoting road safety audits and other tools that the industry says the UK is already using widely (Surveyor, 27 April).
John Dawson, chair of EuroRap, told Surveyor: ‘We cannot be complacent, we are starting to see a gap opening up between the UK and its peers in Sweden and the Netherlands as those two countries introduce a “mass action” approach to reducing accidents at junctions and occurring while overtaking.’
EuroRap would advocate finding a legislative way of promoting greater transparency on what measures were being introduced on the most dangerous roads. US states have to publicise their worst 5% of routes and inform their residents what they are doing to improve them.
UK road authorities were spending small sums per head of population on making roads more forgiving compared with elsewhere in the West, and there was no independent auditing of their programmes.
Dawson claimed the commission would be ‘very interested’ in what EuroRap had to say. The organisation’s work is mentioned in the consultation document on the Directive.