Organisation: Road Safety Foundation
Date of Publication: December 2023
Uploaded to Knowledge Centre: 13 December 2023
Urgent, life-saving investment is required in Britain’s network of motorways and major ‘A’ roads, according to this report from the Road Safety Foundation.
The report says that while these roads make up less than 13% of the whole network, almost 60% of all fatal crashes and more than 40% of serious crashes occur on this network.
The report says the Major Road Network in England represents a huge opportunity to reduce death and injury. This is a classification of local authority roads that are the most important ones – carrying high traffic flows including significant heavy and light goods vehicles, and providing vital links between important towns and to the strategic road network managed by National Highways. These roads have more than four times the number of fatal and serious crashes per mile driven compared with the Strategic Road Network managed by National Highways.
The Road Safety Foundation argues that high-return road safety schemes are available across Great Britain, often with much better benefit-cost ratios than for other public sector investment. The societal loss attributable to road crashes in 2022 was £43bn, according to the DfT, so substantial investment in road safety measures known to prevent death and serious injury is justified. So far, the £150million investment in the DfT’s Safer Roads Fund has led to schemes that are expected to prevent 2,210 fatal and serious injuries over a 20-year period, with a societal benefit of £970 million.
The Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) for the latest Safer Roads Fund portfolio investment was 7.4. The report identifies groups of routes that meet different value for money criteria depending on the network to which they belong.
Click on the link below to download the report from the Road Safety Foundation website:
https://roadsafetyfoundation.org/project/road-safety-performance-and-investment-opportunities/