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

5: Identified areas for further work

Research is needed to increase and update knowledge, or to make existing knowledge more accessible, in several areas that go beyond current research programmes. The review team's work has identified 11 specific areas where research could be useful to the development, implementation and assessment of current and future policies in road safety. Seven of these relate to aspects of delivery of the current strategy, one addresses the need for research-awareness among all concerned with road safety, and three look beyond the period up to 2010 covered by the current strategy.

5.1 Research into aspects of delivery of the current strategy

Two research areas relate to the cost-effectiveness of road safety engineering, whose importance is discussed in Section 2.1 and Appendix 5. Road safety engineering has hitherto been cost-effective by such wide margins that simple methods of estimation have sufficed. But with increased investment in such schemes, it will be important to keep estimates of cost-effectiveness up-to-date and to refine the methods of estimation. Work is therefore recommended to;

• produce an up-to-date estimate of the cost of prevention of a death implied by the rates of return on investment currently being yielded by programmes of expenditure on road safety engineering under Local Transport Plans, taking into account all the costs arising from such programmes and the resulting schemes.

Previous estimates have made use of a database of schemes known as MOLASSES, but this is neither representative of the types of schemes implemented, as only the more effective schemes tend to enter the database, nor does it provide a complete picture of their costs because only the cost of construction are included. It is therefore recommended to;

• develop and keep up to date, a database of road safety engineering schemes to replace the current MOLASSES database. This should contain full cost-benefit information for schemes that did not produce forecast casualty reductions, as well as those that did.

The next two research areas relate to engaging with interest groups to understand the potential impacts on them of the road safety strategy, and informing decision makers' judgements of public acceptability of policies and measures. These are to;

• make a systematic inventory of interest groups who might reasonably object to foreseeable safety measures and policies and the rationale for their objections; and
• compile and then keep up to date an authoritative synthesis and digest of results of surveys of public opinion on road safety issues.

The last three research areas under this heading are concerned with enforcement and need to be undertaken in cooperation with the Home Office. They relate primarily to the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of enforcement strategies and are to:

• develop specific agreed performance indicators that relate directly to ways in which police can influence road safety. (These should be developed and monitored by the Home Office in association with other stakeholder departments.);
• evaluate the effectiveness of current enforcement strategies; and
• undertake a cost benefit analysis comparing traffic policing with action against other types of crime.

5.2 Enhancing research awareness in the road safety community

Dissemination of research findings is an important part of the duties of all researchers and sponsors of research. However, accessibility of these findings to researchers, practitioners and others actively trying to reduce casualties is a major issue. People need to have accessible to them the latest research in order to keep abreast of the developments in this complex area and to allow them to participate fully in delivering actions needed to achieve the current target and in the development of its successor. It is therefore recommended to undertake reviews and produce digests in accessible form of road safety research funded by Government, the British Research Councils and foundations, the EU, the motor manufacturers and other interest groups, or published in learned journals or by the OECD.

5.3 Looking beyond 2010

Three areas of research are recommended in order to begin to explore the scope for and eventual limitations on casualty reduction as discussed in Section 4 and Appendix 5. These are to:

• make an improved estimate of the risk of death per person-hour in everyday life other than use of the roads by use of more exact and more finely disaggregated numbers of accidental deaths and associated numbers of person-hours spent in different activities;
• attempt to make an indicative estimate of the reduction in annual numbers killed or seriously injured that would result from undertaking all road safety engineering yielding benefit/cost ratios exceeding 3 and exceeding 1.25 , and the total investment required in each case; and
• attempt to make an indicative estimate of the annual numbers who would still be killed or seriously injured in Britain if the objectives of Sustainable Safety as developed in The Netherlands were pursued as far as would be feasible here.

It is for the Motorists' Forum to consider which, if any, of these 11 items should go forward in Stage 2 of this review.

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