Mass safety pledge for Scotland’s roads

14 November 2007

Transport Scotland has committed itself to the wholesale removal or replacement of roadside hazards such as signposts ‘if pro-active risk removal can provide cost benefits’.

Transport Scotland’s new road safety plan ‘marks a shift to a more pro-active approach to safety,’ the Scottish Government announced, ‘particularly in the early identification of potential accident locations’.

In future, as well as tackling historic accident blackspots, Transport Scotland is proposing to reduce risks on routes with higher-than-average, but dispersed, accidents. This will include a focus on so-called ‘mass action strategies’ to cut the number of motorists killed and seriously injured from hitting roadside objects, accounting for over 30% of all accidents.

Larger signposts will be replaced by collapsible ‘passively safe’ posts across the network in an annual programme.

A spokesman for Transport Scotland told Surveyor: ‘While individual blackspot treatments can offer very high first-year rates of return, they may only reduce a small number of injury accidents. ‘While we are currently assessing the economic criteria for “mass-action risk removal” strategies, we are confident they offer strong investment opportunities, and the potential to reduce a large number of injury accidents.’

Transport Scotland expects more than £1M to be spent across Scotland on the ‘safer roadsides’ programme in 2007/08. This is likely to grow as the agency explores new opportunities for tackling ‘unforgiving and disproportionate penalties’ for vehicle occupants leaving the carriageway, including ‘trees, walls, signposts, water features, telegraph poles, etc’. An important part of this will be reducing the risk from trees: much of the Scottish trunk road network is tree-lined. Transport Scotland is participating in a UK technical project board, set up to develop a strategy to achieve a 50% reduction in tree-related casualties. It stresses that there is ‘a balance to be struck between environmental protection and managing a safe, reliable road network’.

Another significant change in the strategy is a proposal for a dedicated rural junction improvement programme, which will entail ranking junctions according to the risk of crashes. The strategy highlights roundabouts as having much lower numbers of accidents resulting in deaths and serious injuries than other junctions, particularly T-junctions, where there is an increased risk of devastating side-impacts.

John Dawson, chairman of Eurorap, welcomed the strategy, predicting that mass action risk removal would represent ‘very good value for money’

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Mass safety pledge for Scotland’s roads

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