The best way to reduce road casualties further would be to increase funding for safety engineering, according to research for the post-2010 strategy.
The steering group for the new 10-year road safety strategy for England commissioned TRL to estimate the impacts on casualties of implementing new measures to reduce the numbers killed and seriously injured by a further 33% by 2020.
TRL assessed both measures that have been included in the draft strategy, such as implementing 20mph zones more widely, and others, such as mass action programmes to reduce motorcyclist casualties.
The final report on the research highlights that increasing investment in road safety engineering has the best financial return of any measure by far.
An annual funding increase of just 25% on current levels – £200M – would reduce casualties by at least 1,487 every year.
On this most conservative estimate, there would be a positive cost-benefit of £1.8bn, the casualty savings worth £3.8bn achieved at a cost of £2bn. But in the most optimistic scenario, over 10 years, there would be a cost benefit of £12.3bn.
By contrast, the next most beneficial measure, to use 20mph in metropolitan residential areas more widely would have a cost-benefit of between £578M to £2.2bn at best. Reducing the national speed limit on all single carriageway roads without median barriers to 50mph would have a negative cost-benefit of –£149M.
Given this, road safety minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, rejected simply reducing the national limit to 50mph and instead, in a move welcomed by the AA, backed a continuation of a targeted approach, by tackling the lack of progress by some authorities (Surveyor, 23 April).
However, despite the evidence from TRL, the Department for Transport made no commitment to increasing investment in road safety engineering. The draft strategy suggested the DfT should ‘ensure that the compelling economic case for investing in good-quality road safety schemes is understood by local highway authorities’. The DfT’s consultation on the draft strategy runs until July.
www.trl.co.uk
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