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

Appendix 4: The role of research

A4.1 The research community

Over the years there has become a shortage of research staff with the necessary skills. The area is not attracting enough young researchers to build a strong research capacity that is sustainable. There needs to be sufficient capacity to carry though any research agenda in road safety but here are only a small number of universities and consultancies who are experienced in the more complex areas of road safety research, and these are often made up of very small teams or even individual researchers, many of them in the second half of their careers.

There is need for more cross-departmental working in the area of road safety with the consequent need to ensure sustainable collaborations are built up. Government has a role to play to ease this problem through its funding streams and commissioning practice.

A4.2 Road safety research

The Department of Health in its Task Force Report on injury prevention (DH 2002) has a section on dissemination of research. It is equally relevant to road safety.

"Dissemination of information is an important part of the duties of all researchers and Government Departments. Research needs to be put into practice. The first step is to make people aware of research findings relevant to their practice. The accessibility of research findings is a major issue across all research fields."

Much research is being undertaken, especially by DfT whose research budget is for road safety is of the order of £4.6million per annum for road safety and another £4.8million for vehicle safety. The Compendium of Research Projects 2001/2002 (DTLR 2002a)lists a strong research programme across all areas of the road safety strategy. The majority of the research results are published either by the contractor who was engaged to undertake the work (DfT has links to TRL's website) or by DfT itself. However, despite this being readily available there is a general lack of knowledge of work completed. Even for researchers in the field there is a task at the beginning of each research question to search the literature.

The DfT is not the only body who sponsors research. There are research councils such as EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council) and ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council). The dissemination of results of road safety projects funded by these means are rarely on the bookshelves of practitioners.

An important source of transport and road safety research is the EU under its framework programmes. Many of these outputs may be found on the CORDIS website (http://cordis.europa.eu). However, this website is not easy to use and needs to be updated by the EU itself.

The OECD publishes reports on a wide variety of road safety issues. But again the results of this work are almost unknown to practitioners and not as widely used by the research community as they might be.

• Dissemination strategies need to be developed by the DfT and others at national, regional and local levels so that research results are accessible and relevant to those involved in road safety at the local level. One way to achieve this is to ensure that support is given to more reviewing activity so that what research there is, can be made easily accessible to everyone who needs it.

DfT disseminates many of its research findings through conferences and seminars aimed at practitioners. It has recently (DfT 2002b) put on a seminar to bring together practitioners, policy makers and researchers to share their knowledge in the area of recently completed child road safety research. The day was well attended and the feedback positive from the practitioners. Time will tell whether this event changed practice at the local level.

There is an issue as to whether LAs think they have enough guidance from DfT. However, the DfT issues Traffic Advisory leaflets and good practice guides on many subjects. The DfT has recently undertaken a survey of LAs to ascertain how many are using its Road Safety Good Practice Guide (DTLR 2001). Once the results of this become available it may be possible to point to where the breakdown in communication lies.

• Dissemination is not just a matter of making people aware of the results of research. It is also about changing professional practice so that those directly or indirectly involved in road safety practice act upon this research evidence. Effective ways need to be developed of getting research into practice across this heterogeneous discipline. This is an important part of training and capacity building referred to in Sections 2 and 4.

The road safety community has a database of effectiveness of measures. It is called MOLASSES and it is administered by TRL. But unfortunately it is not representative of the sorts of schemes that are installed, nor does it give an accurate idea of effectiveness as only those enthusiastic authorities with a good scheme contribute to it. It lists no failures, neither is it representative of costs, a point made further in Section 4. The road safety community needs a new database to replace MOLASSES to which contributions are a requirement of LTP funding and there is a database with a representative sample of schemes of all types and costs.

A4.3 Home Office Research

Limited research has been conducted by the Home Office in the area of traffic policing and vehicle crime with 7 projects relating to traffic policing listed on the website in the period from 1994, with only 2 since 2000. (Home Office Website - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/aboutrds1.html).

The Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate also maintains a number of databases which are directly related to road safety issues (e.g. Motoring statistics and breath-test summary figures). Further research is conducted by the Home Office Police Scientific Development Branch, although research reports are limited to a project in 1996 (Automated Traffic Enforcement Systems), and in 1998 (Police Patrol Car Livery). In support of this type of research, the DfT have funded a number of projects relating to enforcement, but more on the penalties side, as delivery of policing is not within their remit.

It is clear that there is currently little in the way of research on ways to improve the quality of delivery in road policing (particularly at the strategic/delivery level), and as a result there is perhaps ineffective use of what is essentially a limited resource.

A4.4 References

Department for Transport (2002) Child Road Safety Research into Practice. Seminar at Birmingham City Council House 28 November 2002.

Department of Health (2002). Preventing Accidental Injury: Priorities for Action. London: TSO.

Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (2001). A Road Safety Good Practice Guide for Highway Authorities 1st Ed. DTLR: London.

Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (2002). Road Safety Research: Compendium of Research Projects 2001/2002. DTLR: London.

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