The Road Safety Framework (May 2011)
The Government's long-awaited Strategic Framework for Road Safety was finally published in great haste on 11th May, to coincide with the launch of the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety. CTC was pleased that to see that it sets two new indicators to measure its future success: the numbers of people killed or seriously injured per billion miles travelled; and for public perceptions of the safety of walking and cycling. CTC has been calling for these for some time. We generally welcome fixed penalty notices for careless driving, but its lukewarm stance on 20 mph and its failure to increase resources for traffic policing is disappointing.
The first thing to note is that the strategy doesn't contain any targets whatsoever, despite strong calls from everyone involved in road safety. Ministers clearly see targets as a New Labour aberration - even though the Coalition Government has supported climate change targets, and it was a Conservative Government that set the UK's first road safety targets back in 1987.
Instead, the strategy has ‘indicators’ to measure whether or not road safety is heading in the right direction. This is where we come to the good news. Firstly, the Government will now measure not only the numbers of people killed or seriously injured (KSI) for different transport modes, but also the KSI rates per billion miles travelled. In other words, if cycle casualties go up slightly but cycle use has gone up steeply, the casualty rate will still show that the risk of cycling has gone down.
Even better news is that the strategy also includes an indicator for public perceptions of the safety of walking and cycling. This will encourage local authorities to tackle the fears that deter people from cycling - and dissuade them from pursuing the sort of scary ‘road safety education’ campaigns that put people, especially children and their parents, off cycling. CTC called for both of these indicators in our Safety in Numbers campaign as they will help to focus local and national government on promoting more as well as safer cycling, recognising that the two objectives go hand in hand.
The strategy is disappointingly lukewarm on 20mph speed limits. It promises a framework to help local authorities take account of all the relevant factors - including health, environmental and severance issues as well as economic factors - when setting local speed limits. However, it falls a long way short of encouraging local authorities to regard 20 mph as the norm for most urban streets. Moreover, there is very little on encouraging local authorities to adopt safer, more pedestrian-and-cyclist friendly street designs. This too is clearly an issue where ‘local authorities know best’ and the Government feels no need to show leadership.
Lorry safety too gets a brief mention, with commitments to reduce the risks of lorry drivers failing to see pedestrians and cyclists. This comes in the aftermath of European Parliament's fantastic response to Kate Cairns's See Me Save Me campaign, following the death of her sister Eilidh, killed by a lorry whose driver was fined just £200 for driving with uncorrected defective eyesight. 401 MEPs - well over half the European Parliament - backed Written Declaration WD81, which therefore obliges the Commission to act on the declaration’s call to reduce the problems of lorries' so-called ‘blind-spots’. The Department for Transport (DfT) also has some forthcoming research on this subject. Yet at the same time the Government is also proposing to relax the eyesight requirements for drivers (and for lorry drivers in particular), and to increase the maximum length permitted for lorry cabs by 2.05m. This is hardly a fitting response to the Cairns family's admirable campaign.
The strategy's headline proposals are to allow police officers to hand out fixed penalty notices (FPNs) for ‘careless’ driving offences, whilst encouraging the courts to make stronger use of their powers to confiscate and crush vehicles owned by those who persist in driving recklessly. The stated aim is to ‘nudge’ the generally law-abiding but occasionally careless driver into improving their behaviour, while freeing up the courts and police to devote their scarce resources to tackling the really serious offenders. The principle is in many ways a sound one, but the devil is in the detail. It very much rests on how you define a ‘careless’ driver, as opposed to a ‘dangerous’ one. ‘Carelessness’ is commonly understood as a state of mind, while danger is the situation that results from someone's driving regardless of the state of mind which motivated it, whether carelessness or recklessness. Hence an act of ‘merely’ careless driving can cause real danger, and real death or injury. For more on this see our webpage on dangerous driving.
But the strategy's most serious failing is the lack of any increased resource for road traffic policing. Transport Secretary Philip Hammond MP says he wants decisions on funding priorities are to be taken locally, in response to local priorities and with accountability to local communities. However it is hard to see how local communities can take those decisions sensibly when the funds simply aren't there in the first place. If anything, traffic police numbers are likely to face sharp cuts in the coming years, and road safety is bound to suffer.Click here for our briefing on traffic policing.
A new EU-wide comparison (from ETSC) suggests that the UK is one of the least improved countries on pedestrian and cycle safety. Sadly, the new strategy gives very few grounds for optimism that this will change significantly in the near future.
Background: 'A Safer Way'
The last Government’s draft Road Safety Strategy, 'A Safer Way', backed a key demand of CTC, by proposing a target to halve the risks of cycling by 2020.
This is an important victory for CTC's campaigning. The Government's previous road safety targets, measured purely in terms of numbers of injured cyclists, led many road safety officials to think the best way to meet their targets was to reduce cycle use rather than encouraging it! A Safer Way's target, however, is measured in terms of the risk of a serious or fatal injury per mile cycled, i.e. the actual risks faced by individual cyclists. It also means that increased cycle use would help meet the target, so long as cyclists' casualties are either reduced, or rise less steeply than the increases in cycling.
The Government's proposed new 'rate-based' target is in line with research by CTC on the ‘Safety in Numbers’ effect, showing that cycling gets safer the more cyclists there are. We now hope that local authorities can feel confident in promoting cycling without the erroneous fear that overall numbers of injuries to cyclists will increase along with cycling levels.
CTC believes the best way for the Government to achieve its proposed target is to double cycle use.
This in turn involves tackling the fears that deter people from cycling: the speed of traffic, irresponsible driving, hostile roads and junctions, and dangerous vehicles especially lorries. Meanwhile good cycle training needs to be available for people of all ages to give them the skills needed to cycle confidently and safely on the roads.
Encouraging more and safer cycling go together. This will improve safety not just for cyclists but for all road users (since cyclists are very rarely involved in collisions where other road users suffer serious injuries), as well as having benefits for our health and that of our streets, communities and the environment.
CTC's full response to A Safer Way can be downloaded here.
