Engineering a safer future: performance managing busy high risk routes to minimum safety levels

The Prime Minister has set autumn 2012 as the deadline for a radical review of the finance and ownership of the major road network. The Road Safety Foundation has analysed the safety of Britain’s entire motorway and A road network and is calling on government to make safety central to any reform. It argues in this report that minimum safety levels should be set which make sense to the public, to investors and to new operators of Britain’s major road infrastructure.

The report also claims that ‘simple attention to safety engineering detail has resulted in extraordinary cuts in road deaths and serious injuries. Fatal and serious injury crashes on just 10 stretches of treated road fell by nearly two thirds from 541 to 209 (2001-2005 and 2006-2010) – and a boost to the economy worth £35m every year.

Summary of the report
• The report measures safety levels across 27,000 miles of motorway and A road where the majority of UK road deaths occur.

• The report presents findings of huge economic rewards from low-cost safety engineering.

• The UK’s busiest higher-risk roads are named, along with each region’s highest-risk road.

• New average speed cameras and interactive speed signs feature strongly on most improved roads.

· Single carriageways now six times more risky than motorways.