Conclusions and recommendations
1 Child pedestrians from the most deprived
areas remain four times more likely to be killed or injured on
the roads than those from the least deprived areas.
The Department should give priority to promoting targeted road
safety schemes in deprived areas that suffer most from child pedestrian
casualties.
2 Speed is an overwhelming factor in the incidence
and severity of injuries to pedestrians and cyclists, whose chances
of survival diminish rapidly at speeds over 20 miles per hour.
The Department should promote measures to reduce speed, including
the use of speed cameras, 20 miles per hour zones and road humps,
to encourage local highway authorities to adopt them and to influence
the attitudes of all road users.
3 Despite its leading role in the promotion
of road safety the Department does not always know about successful
schemes undertaken by local areas, such as the Lothian Borders,
and does not engage sufficiently with practitioners.
The Department should actively seek examples of successful road
safety schemes run by local highway authorities and issue guidance
on how these can be used more widely in ways that practitioners
find easy to accommodate.
4 It is surprising that the Department was
unaware of a strongly held perception that, through the irresponsible
behaviour of some cyclists, they are a hazard to themselves and
other road users. The Department should
devise education, training and publicity measures to target such
anti-social behaviour, particularly when it breaks traffic laws.
5 There is substantial evidence that fewer
people would be killed and seriously injured on Great Britain's
roads if this country were to put the clocks forward by one hour
throughout the year. The Department should
take the lead in re-examining the practice of changing clocks
at the end of British Summer Time with other central Government
departments.
6 The Department recognises that the police
data used to measure its road safety performance consistently
understate the numbers of road casualties each year and it is
attempting to clarify this by matching these data with those collected
by the National Health Service. When it
has completed this work, planned for Summer 2009, it should devise
a formula for adjusting the police data in reporting progress
against its targets each year.
7 Road safety is not the first priority for
some organisations with which the Department works, for example
other central Government departments, but they can be influential.
The Department should develop an explicit strategy to promote
its road safety priorities more effectively among those who can
influence the success of road safety measures.
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