Cutting the cost of dangerous roads: Road Safety Foundation Annual Tracking Report

In a major innovation last year, the government allocated a £175m Safer Roads Fund to tackle a portfolio of the 50 most dangerous local A roads in England – roads posing the highest risk of death and serious injury to users. These roads have been inspected, remedial proposals prepared and the first findings will be reported in 2018.

In total, a further 6,111 kilometres on more than 550 sections of unacceptably high risk roads, shown in red or black on Road Safety Foundation risk mapping, will need to be addressed by the Safer Roads Fund in the drive to bring road deaths towards zero.

For the first time, the Road Safety Foundation/Ageas UK partnership has launched an interactive Road Crash Index which shows the level of road safety improvement (or declining performance) in each county between 2010-12 and 2013-15. It shows a county ranking based on improvement, the cost of injury road crashes in each county and the cost per head of population, together with risk maps for each county and any improved or persistently higher risk roads. The interactive includes an opportunity to tweet or email relevant MPs to ask them to support road safety investment.

The report, Cutting the Cost of Dangerous Roads, identifies that on the EuroRAP network of Motorways and A roads (the 10% of the road network that contains half of all road deaths):

• Great Britain’s highest risk road is the A537 between Macclesfield and Buxton, known as the Cat and Fiddle, in the Peak District
• This year’s most improved road is the A4151 in Gloucestershire from Nailbridge to the A48
• Single carriageway ‘A’ roads are 7 times the risk of motorways and nearly 3 times the risk of dual carriageway ‘A’ roads
• The largest single cause of death on the network was run-off road crashes (30%)
• The largest single cause of serious injury on the network was crashes at junctions (33%)
• High risk single carriageway roads are 67 times more risky than low risk single carriageways.

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