Road Safety – £2.5 Billion Project Aims To Reduce Road Deaths
A new £2.5 billion project is aiming to reduce the number of road deaths on UK roads in the coming years.
The idea for the multi-year project is to reduce serious injuries and deaths, preventing as many as 17,000 over the next 20 years.
By mapping out crash risks on various roads around the country, the methodology in the ‘Driving Change: Investing in Safer Roads’ report by the Road Safety Foundation looks at where investment in road safety can provide strategic benefits.
A formula known as the BCR (Benefit-Cost Ratio) has been applied to calculate the typical levels of casualties and work out whether that’s relative to figures in the last 6 years…
Roads and sections of road that score higher will be targeted with higher funding to alleviate issues that safety experts believe are cropping up in higher ratios in recent years.
Analysing The Future Of Road Safety
We’ve all heard lots about the role that technology has to play in road safety and measures to curb dangerous driving.
But applying technology to preventative measures through strategic funding is an idea that hasn’t been tested yet.
The report has identified just under 10,000km of roads on 584 different routes around the UK where £2.5 billion could be deployed to reduce the number of incidents occurring.
In turn, that will reduce the number of serious injuries and deaths, which the report estimates at as many as 17,000 over the next two decades.
Aside from the road safety and human life impact, there’s also a cost to authorities and to society when a serious incident occurs, which is significantly higher than the cost of installing preventative measures.
Reducing the burden on a stretched healthcare system is one tangible benefit outlined by road safety experts, which the government will be considering.
Road Safety Moving Forwards
Interestingly, the report outlines how incidents have been ‘mapped’ on major roads since 2002, primarily on Britain’s motorway and A-road network.
Using that, they were able to categories the roads (and stretches of roads) into specific bands - black (high risk), red (medium-high risk), orange (medium risk), yellow (low-medium risk), and green (low risk).
In total, 2% of roads in England are classed as high-risk, while 3% in Scotland are in a staggering 5% of roads in Wales are classed as high-risk.
Part of the issue is that there isn’t a dedicated stream of funding aimed at preventing road deaths, which means it’s hard to attribute what level of road improvement funding is specifically targeting safety in that manner.
Add that into the issues around potholes and local authority funding, and it’s clear that consideration needs to be made over how funding for road improvements is distributed moving forwards.
Do you think more needs to be done to address road safety through improvements to major routes? And do you think targeting that funding by statistical analysis is the smartest option? Let us know in the comments below…
