A Safer Way
Our main points in response to the consultation paper were:
- The vision to have "the safest roads in the world" is laudable but the consultation paper gives us no feel as to how the stated targets will deliver this. In particular, there is no discussion about how road safety risk in other countries can be expected to change and therefore, whether the targets are challenging enough.
- In general the establishment of safety targets is a good thing but this needs to be tempered by a realistic but challenging view of what can be achieved, and an understanding of how this is to be realised.
- Better appreciation of what safety improvements can be realised demands smarter use of existing data as well as development of high level risk models.
- The emphasis in the paper on better use of data is to be encouraged but where additional data collection is suggested, this needs to be linked more tightly to the reasons for collecting the data.
- We think that the retention of safety targets in terms on numbers of killed and seriously injured (KSI) is a missed opportunity. This weights serious injuries equally with fatalities and is at odds with the fatalities and weighted injuries (FWI) approach adopted by the rail industry.
- The safety targets as currently expressed do not explicitly recognise the potential for risk transfer between different parties (e.g. road users and road workers and between road users). There should be a more explicit statement about the unacceptability of this.
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