Road safety campaigners are asking the government to invest in measures to cut road deaths and accidents at known blackspots as another method in the armoury against injuries and fatalities.
Britain is slipping down the European road safety league table, despite workplace training schemes to ensure that company car drivers are up to date with the Highway Code and Health and Safety legislation.
RoadSafe director Adrian Walsh said: "Last year 30,720 people were killed or seriously injured in road traffic crashes.
Campaigners calculate that a safe road infrastructure programme could halve that figure by 2015 and halve it again by 2020 thus saving £6 billion or 0.5 per cent of GDP a year.
"For more than a decade, vehicle manufacturers have been building safer cars in response to the launch of Euro NCAP. Now it is time for the government to put its hand in its pocket and increase the amount of money spent on local road safety schemes from less than £150 million a year. Where road safety design improvements have been taken at crash blackspots a 300 per cent return on investment in the first 12 months alone has been achieved," Mr Walsh commented.
Pedestrian refuges, roadside safety fencing and the use of collapsible roadside poles in place of rigid poles are all known to reduce injury on the highways, but making roads ‘self-explanatory’ means that driver error as they approach unfamiliar roads can be reduced. Currently 90 per cent of accidents are caused by a driver reaction to a hazard.
