Why Britain has fallen behind on road safety

TRAVERSING THEAGDPRAC EU Pennines along the Snake Pass between Manchester and Sheffield makes for a dramatic alpine-like drive. It can be a dangerous one, too, especially when the fog rolls in (as it did when drove the route recently). Owing to its sharp bends and high elevation, the road is an accident black spot. This section of the 57 connecting England’s third- and sixth-largest cities is more dangerous, judged by the number of collisions, than almost any other stretch of tarmac in the country.Britain once led the world in road safety. Between 1960 and 2000 the number of people who died in road collisions fell by half. The decline in deaths per mile travelled was even more dramatic (see chart). By 2010 Britain’s roads were, along with Sweden’s, the safest in the world. Progress has since stalled. Whereas Sweden implemented “Vision Zero”—a goal of reducing deaths to nil—in 2011 Britain’s Conservative-led government ditched its road-safety target altogether. Britain’s roads remain safe compared with those in most other countries. But road deaths are now a third higher per mile travelled than in the Scandinavian country that invented the three-point seatbelt.In 2023, 1,624 people died on Britain’s roads and another 26,000 suffered serious, often life-changing injuries. Road collisions cost the country about £40bn ($50bn, or 1.5% of ) each year, which includes an estimate of the value of lost life-years. They are the second-most-common cause of death among men in their 20s after suicide. The Labour government will soon publish a strategy that may attempt to emulate Sweden’s approach. That would require repairing roads, reducing speed limits and tackling bad driving. The question, says Suzy Charman of the Road Safety Foundation, a charity, is “how much death and serious injury is society willing to tolerate?”Repairs would be a good starting-point because roads are in a dire state. Blighted by potholes, landslips and bad signage, the Snake Pass may be especially dicey. But a parliamentary-committee report published on January 17th labelled the entire road network a “national embarrassment”. In December the government announced £1.6bn of funding to fill potholes and the like. It will soon be swallowed up. The Asphalt Industry Alliance, a body for bitumen buffs, says £16bn is needed for the backlog of repairs on Britain’s roads.Although roads are far safer than they were a generation ago, plenty of black spots remain. Since 2018 the government has given councils £186m to improve 99 stretches of road. The scheme aims to reduce the number of people who are killed and seriously injured by 2,600 over 20 years. Some think the goal isn’t ambitious enough, though. The Road Safety Foundation calculates that spending £2.5bn could prevent a further 17,000 deaths or serious injuries over a 20-year period.As well as improving roads, policymakers could reduce speed limits. The national speed limit of 60mph (97kph) on single-carriageway roads is too high considering how lethal head-on collisions are, according to Ross Moorlock from Brake, a road-safety charity. Rural single-carriageway roads where the speed limit is 60mph, which carry a small fraction of total traffic, account for one-third of deaths. The Scottish government is consulting on whether to cut its national speed limit to 50mph.That is likely to be unpopular. About half of Wales was opposed when its government reduced the speed limit in built-up areas from 30mph to 20mph in 2023. Despite being implemented chaotically, the scheme has worked, reducing deaths and serious injuries in those areas by some 15%. But it has been so controversial that it may be weakened. “Unfortunately, it seems that people tend to value their own speedy journey over someone else’s life,” says Dr Helen Wells of Keele University.Placing more restrictions on young drivers could also help. Although they account for 7% of licence-holders, a fifth of all serious road collisions involve at least one driver aged between 17 and 24. The Foundation, a lobby group, proposes that drivers under 20 should not be able to carry passengers younger than 25 for six months after they pass their test, unless an older adult is also present. It calculates that the restriction, if observed, would save 44 lives a year. Politicians are wary, however, fearing populist complaints about a “war on motorists”.Safety campaigners also worry that modern cars have too many distractions, such as touch screens. Research shows that hands-free phone calls (which are legal) impair motorists’ performance just as much as holding a mobile phone (which is not). Britain pioneered research into in-car safety standards, such as automated emergency braking and lane assistance. But its exit from the distracted governments from adopting them.Such examples of drift abound. In 2008 Chris Taylor’s 18-year-old daughter, Rebecca, died when her car burst into flames after a collision with another vehicle on a Northamptonshire country lane. It took 12 months before Mr Taylor, who now campaigns for better road safety, fully understood the cause of her death. In 2022 the government promised to create a “road-safety investigation branch” to match those for air, rail and maritime transport, but the plan was dropped a year ago. After a decade of stalled efforts, the route to safer roads should be clear.