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

Appendix 5: The key factors that influence the scope for casualty reduction in practice

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 likely to be achievable in practice:

• limits on reasonable expectation;
• limits on the means of reducing risk;
• limits on readiness of government to spend on safety measures;
• limits on readiness of interest groups to contribute;
• limits on acceptance by the public; and
• limits on readiness for political intervention.

These are discussed in turn in the remainder of this Appendix.

A5.1 Limits on reasonable expectation

The Vision Zero embraced by the Swedish parliament (Ministry of Transport and Communications Sweden 1997),

"the long-term goal . that nobody will be killed or seriously injured as a result of a traffic accident within the road transport system",

has been a source of inspiration to those working for road safety and has been adopted by a number of other countries. But it is based on three misconceptions: that striving for continued reduction in risk implies its reduction to zero, that no trading of safety for mobility is acceptable, and that people can be protected from the consequences of any flouting of traffic law (Allsop 2002).

One important element in the thinking behind the Vision Zero was a realisation that too much responsibility had hitherto been placed on road users to achieve safe use of a system of roads and vehicles whose design made too little allowance for user error. The Vision Zero itself, on the other hand, seems to aim to relieve individual road users of all responsibility for safety in the use of the roads, placing the whole of this responsibility upon vehicle designers, designers and managers of the roads, and commercial operators of vehicles.

Moreover, policies and measures in pursuit of the Vision Zero, even if they could all be afforded, would in due course come up against limits of public acceptability, and to try to overstep these limits would be to risk losing a good deal of what had been gained up to that point. So to regard the Vision Zero as a practical aim is not only unrealistic, but also potentially counterproductive.

A more pragmatic ultimate vision might be to reduce the risk of death per hour spent using the roads to the average risk while engaging in other everyday activities, so that policy for road safety could be merged into general policy for public safety, rather than warranting the particular attention it now rightly receives in the light of the current quite disproportionately high risks of road use.

In round figures, there are about 12 000 accidental deaths per year in Great Britain. Of these, two large groups are associated with disproportionate risk per hour: about 3400 that occur on the roads at a rate of about 170 per billion person-hours, and about 2500 that occur to people aged 75 and over in their homes at a rate of about 210 per billion person-hours. The other 6000 or so occur at an average rate of about 20 per billion person-hours, on the basis of 16 waking hours per person-day of which just one is spent using the roads. Further research could take into account other groups at exceptional risk by appropriate disaggregation of the accidental deaths and estimation of corresponding numbers of person-hours, but as the relevant numbers of deaths per year are in the tens or perhaps just in the hundreds, rather than in the thousands, this is unlikely to affect the estimate of 20 per billion person-hours greatly.

Thus the risk of death per hour in using the roads is about 8.5 times the average risk in the rest of everyday life, and reducing it to the latter level would reduce deaths on the roads to about 400 per year.

However, the rest of everyday life is spent largely without travelling at speeds greater than a brisk walking pace, from which the human body has evolved to withstand being brought suddenly to rest, whereas use of the roads involves either motion in vehicles travelling much faster than this, or being in close proximity to such vehicles. Using the roads might therefore, even with every reasonable precaution, be expected to carry appreciably higher risk to life than the rest of everyday life.

An alternative comparator is the risk of death in travel by rail, which is around 50 per billion person-hours. Reducing the risk in using the roads to this level would imply reduction to about 1000 deaths per year. This corresponds to the vision "to make road travel as safe as any other mode" suggested by the Directorate-General for Transport and Energy of the European Commission (2001) in its consultation about its forthcoming third road safety action plan.

Such a limit is well beyond what might be approached in the period to 2010, even if the present target for reduction in numbers killed or seriously injured were to be surpassed. But if the target for 2010 is reached with numbers killed reduced in the same proportion as numbers of seriously injured, and an ambitious target for 2020 were then to be set, then the figure of 1000 deaths per year would come within sight.

A5.2 Limits on the means of reducing risk

Risk of death or injury on the roads can be reduced by policies and measures that either reduce the risk of collision (primary measures), or reduce the severity of injury when collisions nevertheless occur (secondary measures), or do both of these. In The Netherlands, the scope of such policies and measures has been well summarised in that country's cogent strategy for Sustainable Safety (Wegman and Elsenaar 1997), whose title in Dutch would be better translated as Lasting Safety. Their scope is there described as being to deliver

• infrastructure adapted to the limitations of the users;
• vehicles adapted to simplify driving and protect people; and
• road users properly educated, informed and deterred;

leading to use of the roads that is

• functional in that the use of each road or path is consistent with the functions for which it is designed;
• homogeneous in that large differences in speed, mass and direction between vehicles sharing the same roadspace are minimised; and
• predictable in that road users are only rarely confronted with the unexpected in terms of road layout or other people's behaviour.

The principal limitations on the means available to achieve these objectives can be summarised as follows:

Even with expensive physical adaptation and skilful management of functions and use, appreciable parts of the existing road infrastructure will fall short of being functional in the above sense, will still from time to time and place to place make greater demands than would be ideal upon the skills of road users, and will still leave open the possibility of severe collisions in some locations and circumstances.

Even with all foreseeable advances in vehicle technology, including those which promise much by way of collision prevention, there will still be room for driver error, and some collisions that give rise to large velocity changes for occupants or struck pedestrians will still occur and be injurious.

Even with the best education, information and deterrence, some road users will still sometimes behave unpredictably, be taken by surprise, be subject to lapses, make errors or act irresponsibly enough to commit offences that give rise to accidents and injury.

It would be a substantial piece of research to make even indicative estimates of the annual numbers of people who would continue to be killed or seriously injured in traffic accidents in Britain after the kinds of changes to vehicles, to roads, to road user education, training and information, and to traffic law and its enforcement that are envisaged in The Netherlands under Sustainable Safety were pursued in Britain as far as would be feasible under the circumstances prevailing here. This would involve examining differences in the vehicle fleet (notably the range of powered two-wheelers), differences in traffic law (for example in priority rules), differences in the acceptability of changes in road user behaviour, and especially differences in the acceptable level of expenditure on adapting the road network and in the acceptable degree of change in the appearance of local roads. Judgements would need to be made about various aspects of acceptability. It would be a challenging research task, but one that might well be usefully attempted.

A5.3 Limits on readiness of government to spend on safety measures

In the context of road safety engineering, Evans has estimated (2001) that in the late 1990s the limitations on the resources available to highway authorities in Britain to devote to local safety schemes resulted in criteria for such investment which implied that at most about £105 000 at 1998 prices was being spent to prevent a death. It would be very useful to update this estimate, perhaps using data from Annual Progress Reports on Local Transport Plans and their London counterpart. In doing so, all the costs arising from planning and managing programmes of local road safety engineering schemes, including the costs of design and public consultation for all schemes that are proposed, whether actually implemented or not, should be appropriately attributed to the schemes that do proceed and are being evaluated. Appreciable costs and benefits in terms of travel time and vehicle operating costs (correctly estimated from associated changes in the movement of vehicles) should also be taken into account alongside the value of reductions in accidents and casualties. All these aspects are important, because some estimates of cost-effectiveness of road safety engineering seem to be based on only the construction costs of implemented schemes, which are unlikely to amount to more than one-half, and may well sometimes amount to an appreciably lower proportion, of the total costs arising. Even so, there is little reason to believe that a substantially higher figure than the one estimated by Evans would result.

In contrast, the valuation of prevention of a death that was used in the late 1990s in the appraisal of highway schemes (including local safety schemes) in monetary terms was £1.05m at 1998 prices. If a benefit/cost ratio of at least 1.25 were required from road safety engineering work, to reflect a typical opportunity cost of £1.25 per £1 of revenue raised by the government, this would imply a readiness to invest up to £840 000 to prevent a death, and even requiring the benefit/cost ratio of 3 that is typically required of road construction schemes would imply a readiness to invest £340 000 to prevent a death. As Evans concludes (2001),

"there remains a very strong case for investing more resources in local road safety projects"(p95)

- or putting it another way, it is likely to be a very long time before the scope for cost-effective investment to reduce casualties by road safety engineering is reduced to the level that would correspond to dealing with a trickle of new problems arising from year to year in a comprehensively safety-engineered road system.

This point is reinforced by noting that investment of £50 per resident of Gloucester in the Safer City Project (DTLR 2001) was highly cost-effective (with benefits by the end of the 5-year project period valued at about 4 times the sum invested and continuing casualty reduction benefits to be expected in subsequent years), and investment at the same rate for a population of, say, 40 million urban residents would take about 20 years at the current rate of spending on road safety engineering.

Nor is this simply a matter of allocating more finance. There is already a shortage of the skills required by staff responsible for the management of road safety engineering programmes by analysing potential schemes and progressing them through the consultation and decision process, so that substantial expansion of these programmes requires the training of substantially more such staff, for which practical and cost-effective proposals have been put forward (Allsop 2001) This in turn requires sufficiently evident central and local government commitment to create a highly motivating career structure for such staff.

Up to now, the evaluation of local road safety schemes in monetary terms has been largely in terms of the first year rate of return (FYRR), that is the ratio of net benefits in the first year to cost incurred up to implementation. While the evaluation has been mainly of schemes for which this initial cost represents a large proportion of all costs arising from the scheme, and the benefits can be regarded as accruing steadily over, say, 5 years or 10 years from implementation, and while the main purpose of the evaluation has been to compare such schemes one with another as a guide to order of priority and value for money obtained from different schemes, the simple FYRR technique has served its purpose well.

But the range of types of scheme is widening in such a way that schemes differ substantially in scale, in their likely lifetimes, and in their time-profiles of benefit and cost. With the ending of ring-fencing of budgets, more and more schemes will combine safety measures as such with other design features, and yield accident and casualty reductions as just one of a range of benefits. Interaction with other policies, such as improvement of conditions in deprived areas, will influence the order of priority of schemes that meet the basic criterion of cost-effectiveness. All this means that appraisal will take place in a wider context than that of road safety engineering programmes themselves, which calls for a correspondingly more comprehensive kind of appraisal. The time has come for estimation of FYRR to be replaced for the purpose of evaluation in monetary terms by estimation of the benefit/cost ratio, that is the ratio of present value of benefits to present value of costs, estimated for a common number of years into the future sufficient to cover the expected lifetimes of all schemes being considered. In addition, effects such as those on noise, exhaust emissions and severance, for which monetary valuations for inclusion in evaluation have not yet been agreed, should be estimated and noted for purpose of wider appraisal. These changes would in particular align the appraisal of road safety engineering schemes with that of road construction schemes.

Whichever indicator of cost-effectiveness in monetary terms is used, it is important to promote understanding that, whilst carrying out schemes that yield very high values does indeed represent good value for money, choosing to afford only those schemes that yield very high values indicates neglect in failing to carry out also those schemes which would yield less high but still favourable value for money.

Eventually, if sufficient progress is made in improving the infrastructure, then apart from cost-effective treatment of new risks that arise from time to time through changing conditions in the network, further expenditure on road safety engineering would become uneconomic in terms of benefit/cost ratio. The same no doubt applies to other kinds of spending on road safety, but is less readily quantified because the returns from other kinds of spending are harder to estimate.

An indication of a possible timescale for reaching this limit is provided by the authors of the Finnish road safety strategy (Ministry of Transport and Communications Finland 2001). Notwithstanding their adoption of the Vision Zero, they recognise that if their long-term goal of no more than 100 deaths per year by 2025 (or 75 per cent fewer than now) were achieved then it might "be difficult to achieve a significant further improvement in the road safety situation with today's tried and tested measures" and "the growing expenditure on road safety may at some stage exceed the costs of other measures that would achieve similar improvements in well-being and safety". In terms of deaths per person-year, 100 deaths per year in Finland corresponds to about 1200 deaths per year in Britain, but since the Finnish authors give no details of the basis for their judgement, this does not provide a substantiated estimate of the number of deaths per year at which this limit might be reached in Britain. What might well be a tractable first step towards this would be to produce an indicative estimate of the reduction in annual numbers killed or seriously injured if all road safety engineering yielding a benefit/cost ratio higher than 3 or higher than 1.25 respectively were undertaken, and what total investment would be required in each case. In doing so it will be important to distinguish between the scope for road safety engineering in urban and in rural areas.

A5.4 Limits on readiness of interest groups to contribute

Because every substantial economic or social activity makes use of the roads, all stand to gain from reduction in road accidents and casualties, but this does not imply that all stand to gain, less still that all perceive themselves as standing to gain, from every particular road safety policy or measure. For some interest groups, the costs imposed on them, or at least the costs that they perceive to be imposed on them, by a policy or measure may exceed the benefits to them, or at least the perceived benefits to them, of reductions in the risk of accident, injury or death.

It is therefore understandable that particular interest groups from time to time oppose particular road safety policies and measures, even ones which are clearly on balance advantageous to society as a whole. In such circumstances it becomes a matter of judgement for those groups whether to accept actual or perceived disadvantage to themselves for the common good, and where they are not ready to do so voluntarily, it becomes a matter of political judgement whether to require them to do so by legislation and regulation. The latter case is part of the issue of limits on readiness for political intervention that is discussed in Section A5.6. It is in the absence of such intervention that the readiness of the interest groups themselves to contribute can set limits on casualty reduction.

Some such interest groups are to be found among road user groups themselves. Some cycling groups resist encouragement to wear cycle helmets because they see the inconvenience and discomfort of doing so as such a discouragement to cycling as to outweigh the protection from head injury offered by the helmets. Some groups of drivers, while recognising that inappropriate speed is a source of risk, wish more of the responsibility for choice of speed according to circumstances to be left with the individual driver, with less influence exerted by the highway and traffic authority through speed management or by the police through enforcement of speed limits.

Others are to be found among service providers who use the roads to deliver their services. Emergency services whose job is to respond quickly when called to particular sites, and who may be set response time targets, are sometimes among the objectors to installation of speed-reducing measures. Bus operators who wish to offer their customers swift and comfortable journeys may likewise object to safety engineering measures that subject their customers to noticeable detours or to extra acceleration, deceleration and sideways forces.

Some businesses who gain from the sale of alcoholic drinks may resist lowering of the alcohol limit for driving or its stricter or more locally targeted enforcement.

Vehicle manufacturers contribute in many ways to safer use of the roads through technological advances in vehicle safety, but they are understandably strongly influenced by the preferences of their customers. This makes them unlikely of their own choice to modify the design or equipment of their products, even in the interests of safety, in ways that buyers are resistant to paying for. Where they recognise the value of safety enhancements that are not immediately attractive to buyers, they have recognised the advantage of government regulation that obliges all manufacturers to install them to common standards, but they have not always seemed anxious to smooth the path to formulation of regulations requiring them to make their products less injurious, even at very modest cost. This difficulty has been partly circumvented in respect of occupant safety by increasing customer demand for features which enhance this.

The foregoing examples are intended to illustrate how interest groups can limit casualty reduction, and in order better to understand such limits and their potential impact on the road safety strategy, a useful research exercise would be to make a systematic inventory of interest groups who might reasonably object to foreseeable safety measures and policies and the rationale for their objections.

A5.5 Limits on acceptance by the public

People go about their lives in ways that they choose, consciously or unconsciously, in response to the circumstances in which they find themselves. It therefore seems sensible to assume that they do not readily change their behaviour at the behest of government, or in response to other advice, including that of specialist experts, of whom the public seem to be increasingly sceptical, unless they are convinced by some consideration of which they were not previously aware. Their use of the roads, which is interwoven in complicated ways into the rest of their everyday lives, is no exception.

Many ways of making safer the use of the roads require changes in the behaviour of road users, either in response to changes in infrastructure or vehicles, or in response to education, training, publicity, or regulation and enforcement. Changes in infrastructure are a matter for government and changes in vehicles are in the hands of the manufacturers, but in each case, progress in implementing changes is influenced by their acceptability to the public. This is evident, for example, in the case of changes to local roads which form part of people's day-to-day surroundings. It is also true of new safety-oriented technology in vehicles: a long-standing example is the seat belt, which had been available for two decades and whose use by drivers and front-seat passengers had been gradually brought to a level of 40 per cent before its use there was made mandatory and the percentage usage doubled almost overnight. Examples for the foreseeable future are black box recorders of the motion of vehicles shortly before collision, and intelligent speed adaptation, for each of which a period of voluntary fitting and use might well create a climate of acceptance for mandatory implementation.

Regulations imposed on all of us as road users, and advice about how to use the roads, will also meet with resistance if they go beyond the current limits of acceptance by the public. It may of course be possible to win over the public to accept something to which they are at first resistant, but this often takes time, and success should not be taken for granted. Exercise of judgement in such cases is complicated by the role of the media in influencing and interpreting public opinion. Whilst elected representatives are understandably influenced by the media coverage that issues of policy and their associated actions receive or seem likely to receive, they would be unwise to suppose that this coverage necessarily reflects the balance of views held by the public. For example, there are sometimes sharp contrasts between views reflected in the national media and those reported more locally.

It is therefore important to conduct scientific surveys of public opinion to counter any potentially biased representation by the media, and that the resulting information be provided to those responsible for decision making. There is by now a wide range of published results of such surveys related to road safety issues in Britain and other OECD countries, but their findings are widely scattered in the literature and are difficult for the occasional user to bring together in relation to any particular issue. Elected representatives in Britain, their advisors and the interested public could be helped greatly if an authoritative synthesis and digest of such findings, interpreted in relation to the issues as they present themselves in Britain, could be undertaken and then kept up to date as new and updated survey findings are published.

At the local level, a number of studies have suggested the importance of monitoring of public opinion when implementing new measures. In the Gloucester Safer City Project (DTLR 2001), research was conducted annually in the form of a public attitude survey. The report states that:

"This has provided a useful baseline from which to measure public responses to consultation. It is well known that people who object to proposals are more likely to make representations than those who support them. The annual survey enables officials and elected members to see how representative responses to consultation are" (p21).

In addition it states that:

"The public attitude survey carried out on behalf of TRL proved invaluable in identifying whether protesters are in a minority. Those opposed to schemes will make themselves heard at meetings and in the local press. While they may have valid views that should be taken into account, it is possible to gain a false impression of the true state of public opinion. The survey helped to identify the silent majority supporting Safer City schemes" (p38).

In the findings of the evaluation of the Bypass Demonstration Project (Department of Transport 1995), this opinion is expressed:

"Against the background of petitions, independent surveys conducted on a random basis by the consultants found substantial support for proposed measures. Whereas petitions can be notoriously misleading (though they should never be ignored) and consultation questionnaires can suffer from a response bias, these surveys, which have generally had a high level of response, were encouraging to elected members whose enthusiasm and support may have been undermined by adverse reports, particularly in the press" (p38).

While on the one hand the media can have a negative impact on acceptability of various road safety initiatives or measures, they can also play an important positive role in raising support for particular initiatives, and for road safety in general.

Enforcement of road traffic law is an area of particular sensitivity in terms of public acceptance because enforcement has implications not only for casualty reduction but also for wider relations between the police and the public. The findings in the North Report (Department of Transport and The Home Office 1988) concerning the importance of proportionality of enforcement across the wide range of traffic offences, from minor lapses to manifestly potentially fatal disregard of the law remain highly relevant today. These include the conclusion, so relevant to the current issue of camera enforcement, that the objective of reducing death and injury

"amply justifies the police making use of the best available means within the law to deter and detect offenders . [including] .using the latest technology . [targeted] . as precisely as possible on those most likely to be in breach of the law."

Raising the public perception of levels and techniques of enforcement of different aspects of road traffic law is another area in which the media can play an important positive role, in this case by improving perception of the danger which compliance with the law is intended to reduce, and of the risk of being caught if not complying.

In relation to particular safety measures, public acceptability seems likely to be influenced by

• perception of the risk against which the measure is directed;
• social acceptance of the behaviour being regulated;
• inconvenience caused by the measure; and
• intrusiveness of the measure into personal lifestyles.

It seems likely in general that with any increase in the perception of danger, the acceptance of a safety measure will increase, because where there is a high perceived level of danger, motorists tend to be more willing to alter their behaviour. This is evidenced in driver speed in busy environments. However, the level of danger is not always clear to road users from the nearby road environment, and one purpose of the concept of the self-explaining road is to inform road users of the level of danger. More generally, in contrast to the massive aggregate cost of road accidents, they are a rare experience or a seemingly remote prospect for the majority of individual road users, the more so as it is known that the majority of drivers overestimate their skill and underestimate the likelihood of an accident happening to them. This under perception of danger makes it harder to gain acceptance for safety measures that have obvious downsides for affected road users.

If a behaviour with a negative effect on road safety is seen as socially acceptable then there is less chance of changing the behaviour than if it is seen as unacceptable. This is the basis for long-term advertising to induce gradual social change. There are instances where attitudes have changed significantly over time, such as drink driving and seatbelt wearing. At one time, it was socially acceptable to not wear a seatbelt, and longer ago to drink and drive, whereas this is generally not now the case. However, there are other behaviours where an attempt at change has been made but with a lesser impact so far, such as speeding and the wearing of cycle helmets.

The inconvenience caused by safety measures and policies could be said to lie on a continuum, from no discernible effect, through to feelings of severe restriction on desired activity. Tolerance may also depend on the situation (for instance whether a driver is in a hurry). An example is traffic calming, which is a highly effective means for reducing casualties and has shown significant benefit in residential areas, but there are cases in which residents have felt so inconvenienced by traffic calming measures that they have asked for them to be removed.

Intrusiveness is a form of inconvenience that can be felt especially acutely because it affects lifestyle in rather personal ways. Two examples are the wearing of cycle helmets by young children whose use of the bicycle is very close to home and is on the borderline between play and road use, and required carrying of a driving licence by people whose lifestyle is very informal and for whom occasions to drive are unpredictable.

More generally, it may be useful to keep in mind a likely relationship between the sensitivity of people to safety measures and the closeness to home of their impact. At the one extreme, the motorway network is a specialised form of infrastructure, to which there are usually alternatives for those excluded from it or preferring not to use it, and for which limitation of use to fully qualified drivers and exclusion of some kinds of vehicle is accepted. At the other extreme, roadspace in the immediate neighbourhood of people's homes may be seen as an extension of the home, and restrictions on their and their visitors' use of it may be deeply resented - in contrast to deterrence or restriction of its use by others, which may be welcomed.

Understanding of these various dimensions of public acceptance together with the influence of interest groups and media coverage, and of their relationship to decision-making, is important to progress in casualty reduction, and there can be little doubt that they will limit the range of measures that can be implemented. It is hard to see how to research their quantitative implications in terms of limits on the extent of casualty reduction that can be achieved, but these issues should be kept in mind throughout consideration of the findings of Stage 1 of the Review.

A5.6 Limits on readiness for political intervention

Political intervention is required to make changes to the road infrastructure and traffic regulation within existing legislation, because these are central or local government responsibilities according to the category of road, and to alter traffic law, including powers available for its enforcement, and other relevant legislation. Legislation concerning the construction and use of vehicles is very largely harmonised in the European Union (EU) and therefore decided at the EU level. Traffic law and the powers of highway and traffic authorities are a matter for central government. Political intervention can also influence the priority given by the police to enforcement of traffic law.

Limits on political intervention to reduce casualties are encountered when proposals for action within existing powers or for changes in legislation for which a good case has been made in terms of cost-effectiveness and acceptability in principle nevertheless have insufficient public acceptance or are resisted by influential interest groups or minorities among the public. In such circumstances, the relevant level of government has to choose between the alternatives of awaiting a more favourable climate of opinion, or exercising leadership by going ahead in the face of reluctance or resistance, in the expectation of gaining eventual acceptance.

When government decides, as it is sometimes right to do for the common good, to take action within existing powers or bring forward legislation that moves ahead of public opinion or meets resistance from influential interest groups, careful judgement and skilful tactics are required. Elected representatives could be helped by the research suggested in Section A5.5 to remember that pan-European social survey work has shown (SARTRE-2 1998) that public opinion is often more positive towards road safety measures than decision-makers believe. Kåre Rumar advocated (1999) in the first European Transport Safety Lecture that well-founded measures should be marketed and initial public rejection should not be regarded as immutable.

Readiness to move ahead of public opinion is one aspect of political commitment to road safety. Demonstration to the public of such commitment needs to differ from its demonstration to road safety professionals. Experience in The Netherlands in the mid 1990s showed that just as fund-raisers can generate donor fatigue, so the public can become weary of continual rehearsal of the road safety message. Judgement is needed how frequently to reinforce it and how best to refresh it - and this applies to statements from politicians just as much as to other means of communication. In contrast, professionals engaged in road safety work seem to need and value frequent reassurance of continued political commitment to the strategy and targets and to keeping up a matching flow of resources.

At the local level, experience has shown that cross-party political support for road safety programmes is one of the most important requirements for success. Implementing measures will not always be popular, so it is vital that road safety remains a high priority with the elected representatives in the face of periods of public criticism and even possible loss of votes. A political 'champion' can be very helpful in maintaining support for a road safety programme through such periods.

At all levels, it is important for professional advisors to keep up to date the case in support of measures which are for the time being ruled out by elected representatives, because the political moment for bringing forward such a measure can arrive suddenly and unexpectedly - a classic example being the rapid succession of multiple-vehicle accidents in fog on the motorways which provided the political opportunity to introduce, initially for an experimental period, the motorway speed limit and accompanying national speed limit on rural roads in the mid-1960s.

A5.7 Issues for research and policy

This Appendix has highlighted some important issues relevant to how far the road safety community can go in reducing the level of death and injury on the roads without some fundamental changes to the way in which priorities and policies are perceived. Two strands have been identified: one is what extra needs to be known to take the road safety effort further forward and the other is issues of policy. The research issues have been highlighted in the text of this Appendix and are repeated in Section 5. The main policy issues arising may be summarised as follows:

• Road safety should be championed and rise up the political agenda so that an ultimate vision might be that eventually the risk of death per hour using the roads may be reduced to the average risk whilst engaging in other everyday activities, or at least to the average risk of travel by rail, and policy for road safety could be merged into general policy for public safety.
• In the case of road safety engineering schemes all costs arising from planning, designing, consulting upon and managing a programme at the local level should be included in any cost-effectiveness calculation. The costs of schemes designed but not implemented should be apportioned appropriately amongst those that do go ahead. For larger road safety engineering schemes, effects on travel time and vehicle operating costs should be taken into consideration in evaluation in monetary terms and the benefit/cost ratio should replace the first year rate of return as the indicator of cost effectiveness. In addition, social and environmental effects such as severance, noise and exhaust emissions should be included in wider appraisal so bringing into line appraisal of these schemes with that of road construction schemes.
• There is an acute shortage of staff with the necessary skills to undertake the management of road safety engineering programmes. More action needs to be taken by both central and local government to address this.
• Some interest groups hold positions that lead to resistance to the introduction of safety measures known to be successful. Ways need to be sought to engage these groups to identify their motivations in operating levers that they hold, and additionally to identify decision makers' perceptions of these mechanisms.
• Possible changes in policy and practice are influenced by their acceptability to the public. In general the public are not well attuned to the risks of using the road and sometimes resent regulation and changes to road layout that are not in accordance with their perception of the risk. The under perception of danger is an area which needs to be tackled if public opinion is to swing behind measures that cause a degree of inconvenience, loss of time or intrusiveness. To help policy makers gauge the range of public opinion, and judge when to exercise leadership by moving ahead of it, scientific surveys should be undertaken more frequently and their findings brought together more effectively than at present.

A5.8 References

Allsop R E (2001) Road safety - willing the end and willing the means. Transport Research Foundation Fellowship Lecture, University College London, June 2001. Crowthorne: Transport Research Foundation.

Allsop R E (2002) Road safety - Britain in Europe. 12th Westminster Lecture, London, December 2001. London: Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety.

Directorate-General for Transport and Energy (2001) Consultation paper on a 3rd road safety action plan 2002-2010 "A partnership for safety". Brussels.

Department of Transport and The Home Office (1988) Road Traffic Law Review. London: HMSO.

Department of Transport (1995). Better places through bypasses - report of the bypass demonstration project. London.

Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (2001) Gloucester Safer City. London.

Evans A W (2001) Report from the United Kingdom. In: Economic evaluation of road traffic safety measures. ECMT Round Table 117, 77-99. Paris: OECD for European Conference of Ministers of Transport.

Ministry of Transport and Communications Finland (2001) Road safety programme 2001-2005. Helsinki.

Ministry of Transport and Communications Sweden (1997) Vision Zero. Information Sheet. Stockholm.

Rumar K (1999) Transport safety visions, targets and strategies: beyond 2000. The1st European Transport Safety Lecture, Brussels, January 1999. Brussels: European Transport Safety Council.

SARTRE-2 (1998) The attitude and behaviours of European car drivers to road safety, Part 1: report on principal results. Leidschendam: SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research.

Wegman F and P Elsenaar (1997) Sustainable solutions to improve road safety in The Netherlands. SWOV Report D-97-8. Leidschendam: SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research.

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