Campaign slams road policy failure

Roads are poorly engineered for safety, says Safe Speed

Unsafe road?

The new EuroRAP roads safety report published recently indicates substantial failures by authorities to improve road safety through proper engineering, according to road safety campaign Safe Speed.

There are two main forces driving the failure, according to the campaign:

Lack of investment due to 'anti-road policies'
Wrong solutions due to poor understanding of the nature of road safety

Campaign founder Paul Smith said: "Clearly the government and local authorities do not fully appreciate the nature of their road safety responsibilities. We have seen vast amounts of money spent on cameras and reduced speed limits when proper engineering treatments would have been far more effective.

"These wrong policies may make some roads safer, but they also make drivers worse and the overall effect is bad enough to swamp the substantial benefits arising from improved vehicle safety.

"National road safety policy is driven by politics and dogma when it should be driven by science and understanding. The real foundation of road safety is road user psychology and we won't get road safety back on track until this is understood and properly factored in."