One-quarter of county councils and three of the six major conurbations are not on track to reduce the numbers killed and seriously injured on their roads by 40% by 2010.
As the Government prepares to launch a consultation on a new national road safety strategy in the new year, authorities in most regions of England acknowledge that they are unlikely to meet the current mandatory targets.
With two years to the target year, these authorities acknowledge in their local transport plan 2 delivery reports that the targets will not be met on the basis of current trends, and additional measures will be needed.
There were 278 people killed and seriously injured in Dorset in 2007, which was only 15% less than the baseline, the average for 1994-1998, and 23 more than in 2006. Dorset County Council has suggested refocusing road safety spending as a result.
Dorset held a consultation in which it suggested spending more on route safety treatments at the expense of proposals for junction improvements.
East Sussex County Council says in its delivery report that the 2007 result of a 17% reduction compared with the 1994-1998 baseline of 458 casualties is ‘regrettably, some way off target, despite all the initiatives undertaken by the county council’.
The authority plans to achieve a revised target of a 35% reduction by 2010, with additional funding to introduce new lower limits alongside enforcement and education to tackle poor driver behaviour.
Durham County Council says that further reductions in KSIs, following a 27% cut in 2007 to 215, rather than 192 as planned, will be challenging, given the problem ‘has no underlying geographical pattern and variable causes’. Greater Manchester’s passenger transport authority has heard that ‘it is becoming difficult to make further reductions through engineering measures,’ after KSIs were 27% less than the baseline in 2007.
Officers advised that there was a need for both increased enforcement and increased revenue spending on education to cut KSIs.
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