Mixed Priority Routes Road Safety Demonstration Project

The Mixed Priority Routes Road Safety Demonstration Project (MPR) follows a long history of government-led safety demonstration projects, with the aim of helping local authorities tackle road safety problems in new ways.

Dissemination of the findings is a vital element of these projects, ensuring that other local authorities are encouraged to address similar problems and can benefit from the lessons learnt.

The reason behind tackling urban mixed use distributor roads was the consistently high level of casualties on such routes that had not previously been addressed by local authorities. This type of route has tended to stand as something of a ‘grey area’ where accidents are spread across a route and where traditional engineering solutions in localised areas were not sufficient.

Similarly, unlike residential areas or city centres, introduction of physical traffic calming or pedestrianisation schemes is not generally feasible when the route forms part of the local authority’s core network carrying large volumes of traffic. It was the diversity in demands upon this type of route which makes this type of scheme so challenging, prompting investment from the Department for Transport (DfT) for this demonstration project.