RAC Foundation says more focused spending on roads could prevent thousands of deaths

Road safety charity the RAC Foundation claims that up to 6,000 lives on Britain’s roads and billions of pounds could be saved over the next decade if just some of the money used on road maintenance were spent more wisely. That’s the conclusion of research conducted on the organisation’s behalf by the Road Safety Foundation, published in a report called Saving Lives, Saving Money: The costs and benefits of achieving safe roads.

The report finds that most of the £30 billion annual cost of road traffic accidents, equivalent to 2.3 per cent of GDP, relates to incidents on motorways and other major roads. However, it adds that by eliminating what it terms “1-star and 2-star roads,” savings of between £25 billion and £35 billion can be made over the next ten years.

According to the report, “a 5-star rating represents the safest road infrastructure design for the prevailing speed environment and a 1-star rating the poorest;” some 62 per cent of single-carriageway trunk roads are rated 2-star.

It adds that while “the total cost of crashes is well estimated by the Department for Transport but the way costs fall on families, business, carers, NHS, emergency services and the insurance industry is poorly understood.”

The report calls for a 10-year road safety programme, estimated to cost less than 10 per cent of existing road budgets, to deal with shortcomings in safety such as missing fencing and poor road layouts at junctions.

It also calls for a number of other steps to be taken to address road safety issues, such as:

• “The government‟s upcoming Strategic Framework for Road Safety to make the Highways Agency – Britain’s single largest crash cost centre – the model of best practice from which UK authorities can learn;

• “New good practice guidance for authority leaders and professionals on generating and evaluating safety schemes so 1- and 2-star roads are eliminated and dual carriageways and motorways are brought up to high safety standards

• “Parliament and the Treasury to examine the value for money that can be provided by programmes to reduce death and injury and investigate how institutional barriers to rational investment and priority setting can be overcome;

• “Technical improvements to the evaluation of crash costs and recording of serious crashes by police and hospitals, with more focus on long-term care and the true financial costs of road crashes to healthcare and emergency services; and

• “The insurance industry to study the initiatives in other countries where the cost of damage and injury claims has been driven down successfully through improved safety.”

Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation, commented: “Given that Britons are more likely to die on the roads than in any other daily activity, this report should make us first angry, and then determined to act to see more lives saved – at little or no extra cost.

“We will never prevent all road accidents but we can do a considerable amount to reduce their effects simply by improving the road environment and making it as forgiving as possible. We understand road risks well enough to know how to cut this grim toll of death and injury, yet we fail to implement cheap and effective measures to combat them.

“Why do we continue to tolerate unsafe roads when the cost of bringing the network up to minimum standards is within what we already spend on our roads? It beggars belief that we are not redirecting resources to where they are most beneficial.”

According to Lord Dubs, chairman of the Road Safety Foundation: “Engineering improvements are typically low cost and last decades. Without using a simple measurement of infrastructure safety like star rating, road engineers will remain tongue-tied in trying to explain what can be achieved through proven measures. Without normal methods of cost-benefit analysis, high return safety programmes will continue to be ignored in favour of programmes which are well evaluated.”

Dr Joanne Hill, director of the Road Safety Foundation and a co-author of the report, added: “Most authorities evaluate safety schemes using first year rates of return which ignore the fact that engineering countermeasures deliver savings for decades. This stops life saving projects being compared with other lower return projects and prevents viable projects being generated on the scale justified and now being applied in other countries such as Australia, Netherlands and Sweden.”

She continued: “This year sees the launch of the UN’s Decade of Action for Road Safety. Saving Lives, Saving Money shows that we can significantly cut the cost of crashes between now and 2020, with substantial savings for the health services, long-term care, emergency services, businesses and families.”