Pledge to tackle delays over speed reviews

22 April 2009

The Government wants to tackle local highway authorities’ ‘patchy’ and ‘slow’ progress with their reviews of A and B-roads’ national speed limits in order to cut road fatalities by one-third.

The Department for Transport (DfT) launched proposals for a new national road safety strategy this week, aimed at ensuring that ‘mistakes on the road don’t lead to death or serious injury’. The new 10-year target would require road deaths and serious injuries to be cut by one-third by 2020.

Road safety minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, rejected simply reducing the national speed limit to 50mph because it would needlessly lead to a ‘large increase in journey times’, given that some rural single carriageways were as safe as motorways. Instead, in a move welcomed by the AA, he backed a continuation of the targeted approach, by tackling the lack of progress by some authorities.

Ministers would ‘recommend’ lower limits on single carriageways by revising the guidance on setting speed limits. Councils’ progress would be monitored, and lack of action on the highest-risk rural single carriageway roads – 10 times more dangerous than the safest roads in the same category – highlighted in new DfT-backed risk maps.

The DfT argued that 333 people were killed on rural single carriageways in 2007 where either exceeding the limit or driving too fast for the conditions was a factor. The evidence, it said, was that drivers in head-on collisions or struck at junctions were far less likely to die at 50mph than at 60mph. Despite this, the DfT complained that some authorities were not making the good process that the best authorities – such as Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire – were in lowering limits and reducing casualties.

The County Surveyors’ Society commented, however, that the guidance already recommended that authorities introduce 50mph limits on the most dangerous roads. But this was only where compliance was likely, given that current mean speeds were below the mid-50s, and engineering measures had been tried first.

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