A top road safety charity has called for ‘urgent, life-saving investment’ in Britain’s major road network, which sees a disproportionate number of serious crashes and deaths.
A new report from the Road Safety Foundation (RSF) says the grouping of local authority roads that carry high traffic flows and provide vital links to important towns and National Highways’ strategic road network, represents a huge opportunity to reduce death and injury.
One of the report’s authors, RSF executive director Dr Suzy Charman (pictured), said it is also vital that the next Road Investment Strategy allocates sufficient funding towards safety schemes, particularly if progress is to be made towards the commitment of zero harm on the SRN by 2040.
The report, Road Safety Performance and Investment Opportunities, identifies groups of routes that meet different value for money criteria depending on the network to which they belong.
It points out that while these roads make up less than 13% of the whole network, they see almost 60% of all fatal crashes and more than 40% of serious road crashes.
These roads also have more than four times the number of fatal and serious crashes per mile driven compared with the strategic road network.
The RSF said high-return road safety schemes are available across the county, often with much better benefit-cost ratios than other public sector investments.
It said the societal loss attributable to road crashes in 2022 was £43bn, according to the Department for Transport (DfT), justifying substantial investment in road safety measures known to prevent death and serious injury.
So far, the Department for Transport’s £150m investment in the 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 £970m, the RSF said.
The benefit-cost ratio for the latest Safer Roads Fund portfolio cash is calculated to be 7.4.
Dr Charman, said: ‘There are incredible opportunities to invest in safer road infrastructure across so many of Britain’s motorways and A roads.
‘The Safer Roads Fund provides us with a blueprint of what is possible, and can be readily extended to local authority major roads.’
