A Review of the Delivery of the Road Safety Strategy - UCL Report

4: The ultimate scope for casualty reduction

In a highly motorised society in which there are competing social, economic and political concerns and other calls upon public and private expenditure, and in an area of policy where there are technical limits to change, and where change requires contributions from many interests and widespread acceptance by all or large parts of the population, there are six main sources of limitation on the degree of casualty reduction that is practically achievable:

• reasonable expectation - expectation of casualty reduction stems from risk in using the roads being disproportionately high compared with the risks in other necessary everyday activity; if risk in using the roads is sufficiently reduced, the expectation of further reduction may cease to warrant a high-profile road safety effort distinct from wider policies for public safety;
• the means of reducing risk - there are limits to what can be achieved by way of modifying the roads, the vehicles or the behaviour of road users;
• readiness of government to spend on safety measures - government should not be expected to spend on safety measures beyond the point at which the benefit to society of doing so comes into appropriate balance with the cost;
• readiness of interest groups to contribute - interest groups can reasonably resist safety measures that are sufficiently disadvantageous to them, and can be powerful enough to prevent such measures being implemented;
• acceptance by the public - many safety measures affect people's everyday lives or their surroundings sufficiently for their effective implementation to depend on gaining public acceptance; and
• readiness for political intervention - implementation of some safety measures requires elected representatives to move ahead of public opinion or confront media pressure in ways that risk unpopularity.

These are discussed in detail in Appendix 5. Some of them will affect policy directly only after the current target period, but others do so already and have been referred to in Section 2. All of them are relevant to understanding of the strengths of the case for vigorous action to reduce the current numbers killed or injured on the roads, the degrees of reduction it is reasonable to aim for in this target period and in the longer term, and the nature of the real difficulties to be encountered and addressed in the pursuit of casualty reduction. They also point to a number of areas where tractable further research could increase understanding and facilitate progress.

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