Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
140-150)
MR ROB
SALMON, MR
CHRIS LINES,
MR NEAL
SKELTON AND
MR PAUL
EVERITT
30 APRIL 2008
Q140 Graham Stringer: The fact is
that you can pass your motorcycling test on a 150cc and go out
the next day and buy a 1000cc bike and kill yourself the day after.
Mr Everitt: I do not think you
can, sorry.
Q141 Graham Stringer: Can you not?
Mr Everitt: No, you have to have
at least a two-year period or you have to take a specific test
on a higher-powered machine.
Q142 Graham Stringer: That is helpful.
Mr Lines: I just worry that several
of these conversations are symptomatic of the ignorance that the
public has about road safety, the lack of education and the lack
of knowledge and the fact that they do not appreciate the risks.
Education is the answer and we think educating children at an
early age through their upbringing is a very important step and
I worry that there is a bit of a missed generation that are now
reaching the dangerous age. It all links for me to having a society
which takes road safety seriously and the understanding that if
they go out on a powerful bike they are likely to kill themselves
and others and so forth, and they will willingly look for training,
not have it forced upon them by some nasty government, that they
would actually realise that they need training and seek it out.
That is the best way forward, and something like a Swedish Vision
Zero for me gives the philosophy and if society raises the importance
in society where people will actually behave that way—it
is people's behaviours we have been talking about largely in terms
of road crashes.
Q143 Mr Martlew: Can I perhaps go
on from that to the issue of the influx of foreign drivers? There
are two issues; one is the left-hand drive vehicles, especially
heavy goods vehicles, and the other one is the people who are
coming, very often from Eastern Europe or Portugal where they
do not have a very good safety record. Do you think that has added
to our problems and if so how do we solve them?
Mr Salmon: It is in some areas.
I believe you are talking to the police later on and they will
have a very definite view on this, but some areas are suffering
from an increased level of concern about the number of those sorts
of drivers. I do not think it is a huge problem in terms of the
total numbers of killed or seriously injured at this time, but
it is an area that we have to watch very carefully. One of the
problems is sometimes even a lack of insurance and a lack of awareness
of the rules, some of the vehicles are actually substandard, vehicles
come into the country for a short time without any standard test
or roadworthiness capability and, on occasions, they are involved
in a crash, but at the moment it is a small but potentially growing
problem and one that I would look to the police for a very specific
view.
Mr Everitt: I know that in terms
of heavy goods vehicles there has been a particular step-up in
enforcement in the UK and that is finding a higher proportion
of foreign hauliers either breaching the drivers' hours or roadworthiness
conditions. Some of the issues are actually about how it is that
those trucks are managing to pass through a large part of Europe
without anybody else bothering to check those vehicles and there
is an issue about how other European countries regard road safety
and the enforcement of roadworthiness, particularly for HGVs.
In terms of the growing number of passenger cars, again that is
an issue about enforcement and visibility.
Q144 Mr Clelland: We had better get
a move on, if we can perhaps brief answers, because we are running
out of time and there are a number of areas we have not covered
yet. Should there be an extension of 20 mph zones, is that something
you would recommend?
Mr Lines: Yes, certainly for urban
areas and for the right sort of residential areas in urban areas
they have proved to be very successful and we know that casualties
are less than half killed and seriously injured so they do work
and the methods are well-known. Having said that, we have largely
delivered 20 mph zones in the past through using engineering measures—road
humps and cushions—which are not always very popular and
which do have a down side for emergency vehicles and buses and
a lot of authorities are very keen to move away from engineering
measures in the 20 mph zones to technology in terms of time/distance
cameras so that we can use those to enforce speeds, which not
only mean there is no engineering and no maintenance but also
it encourages a smooth driving style which, again, is good for
emissions. With that sort of future scenario it is very positive
and I know a lot of urban areas are very keen to try out these
camera systems.
Q145 Mr Clelland: How do you explain
the much higher reduction in serious injuries compared with fatalities
over the last 10 years?
Mr Lines: It touches on some of
the things we have talked about but it is a very complicated question
and I do not have the answer so do not think that I do. My own
personal belief is that one of the issues is that if you look
at fatals they tend to be specific. We talked about young men,
we talked about motorcyclists and these are outside the norm,
the average—average drivers doing average things, we are
getting good at reducing their collisions and mitigating those,
but for the extreme groups—and that includes illegality
as well—a lot of illegal drivers who are not really interested
in laws or measures will just drive illegally regardless. Because
they are a large proportion of the fatals, that sort of driver,
they are very much more difficult to treat.
Q146 Mr Clelland: Why are we not
making such an impact on young drivers which are still the highest
fatalities and injuries?
Mr Salmon: It is a lack of awareness
of risk, it is the impact of their attitude to life and they feel
immune I think. One of the factors, without wishing to make this
sound particularly negative, is that modern vehicles are very
comfortable and young drivers do not actually appreciate in many
cases the speed they are actually doing, they tend to be distracted
because of lack of experience, texting on mobile phones whilst
driving is not just the young but they are suffering quite badly
from it and we have got examples of fatalities that come through
that sort of event. I think, therefore, they are just more prone
to the combination of lack of awareness, lack of experience and
generally being distracted.
Q147 Mr Clelland: Does it make sense
to apply national road safety targets at a local level rather
than doing it at different levels with different targets at the
local level to the national norm?
Mr Salmon: The setting of national
targets has to be reflected locally otherwise how do you relate
to it in terms of joined-up action. What we need though is to
be very clear about what those targets are and very clear about
the user group concept of targeting rather than simply talking
about overall numbers. Overall numbers are very important because
they give us the bigger picture, but we have to agree on what
are the target groups that we work on together to tackle where
the highest risks are and where the numbers are.
Mr Lines: Obviously it does cause
problems. National targets, I agree, are absolutely vital and
we all need something to aspire to but they do get very difficult
to apply when you get right down to the lower levels and small
authorities with a lot of variability in collision data. The benefits
outweigh the disbenefits of having national targets.
Q148 Mr Clelland: Is there a shortage
of road safety professionals?
Mr Salmon: There is an increasing
lack of resource in the industry, not just for road safety but
in engineering generally. There is a lot of pressure on the industry,
a lot going on in the UK, both in terms of local authority and
consultancy activity for road safety work. Road safety is one
of those very specialist areas which tends to be regarded as a
small community within the broader highways and transport industry,
so to get people into road safety they have to want to be interested
in becoming a specialist, the training is a bit patchy and I think
it is an area we need to encourage and provide more positive encouragement
and training for.
Q149 Mr Clelland: What sort of skills
are we short of?
Mr Salmon: It is both in term
of experienced design, there are specialist safety auditors who
will look at schemes but in fact even those are relatively few
and far between. It is those having a long experience of design
for safety, working with safety schemes, understanding what is
going on on the ground as well as what is happening in the minds
of the motorist.
Mr Lines: The skills are engineering,
civil engineering mainly, and associated skills. As Rob says,
there is a general shortage of those (a) coming out of the universities—and
there seems to be a decline as far as I can see in people doing
engineering—and (b) in the opportunities in other areas
so it is very difficult to find new people coming in with those
sorts of skills. Can I just say one other thing about road safety?
It is really important that there is a continuity because I think
road safety suffers from a lack of continuity sometimes, there
are a lot of programmes which are stop/start and that makes life
very difficult for authorities if they do not know there is continuous
funding for the next five or six years to set up teams and to
build teams that are really effective.
Mr Skelton: I would just support
the engineering aspects within the terms of transportation. We
have a huge range of extremely innovative technologies and trying
to attract students to it or arrange university courses to direct
students in those directions is difficult because "Intelligent
Transport" studies are trying to attract a number of students
from limited academic budget availability.
Q150 Mr Clelland: Could I just ask
you a question about mobility scooters? The advent of mobility
scooters has given a lot of mobility to a lot of people up and
down the country and they are very useful little vehicles, but
of course there is no regulation, there is no test needed, there
is no road sense even needed by many of the people who use these
mobility scooters. Should there be more regulation in this area,
what can be done to avoid accidents happening with mobility scooters?
Mr Salmon: It is a difficult question
in the sense that it is a very sensitive area, but certainly the
use on the carriageway of the road with other traffic is clearly
very high risk so I think there has to be some form of legislation
to identify where they should or should not be used. That is going
to be quite a difficult thing to do and I do not think I have
a definitive answer for you.
Mr Skelton: There are several
classifications of mobility scooters but I think the issue is
that they are restricted to eight miles an hour and below, but
as soon as you introduce a vehicle of that nature onto the highway—and
the highway includes the pavement—then you are into road
traffic legislation of a variety which would actually encompass
those, and I am sure the police will actually give you far greater
detail of it. Suffice to say that there is legislation to cover
it, but the difficulty is that we are an increasingly aging population,
with more and more people who recognise the benefits of using
these particular scooters, so it is trying to balance the need
against managing expectations and managing control because, once
again, the majority of people who are tending to use these are
aged and whose control of modern devices is starting to collapse.
I know my ability to manage a DVD is reducing virtually daily
so it is an issue, as I said before, which is very difficult and
complex. There is sufficent legislation in place already to manage
the use of scooters on highways but it would require registration
to enable greater detail of who is actually in control of these
vehicles at the relevant time and that, currently, is very difficult.
Mr Clelland: Gentlemen, thank you very
much for your evidence and advice, it is very much appreciated.
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