Road Safety

an analysis of road safety trends in the UK

Introduction

This web page was written as an investigation into what is happening to road safety in the UK. A lot of nonsense is written about road safety, and so the facts need to be carefully investigated.

Data in this section is taken from the freely available Transport Statistics for Great Britain 2007 (TSGB).

TSGB Statistics 2007

Two sections of data were used:

Section 7 - Roads and Traffic
Section 8 - Transport Accidents and Casualties

The data used is presented in Table 1. It should be noted that in the TSGB statistics the fatalities for 'All Other Road Users' are taken and used as accidents for car drivers - unfortunately the data is not further disaggregated.

Also, there is no measure of pedestrian journey accumulation in the TSGB data. It appears that, in the view of DfT, pedestrians, despite ...

walking along the footways (pavements) which are part of the roads
using the signalised junctions which make up the road network
crossing the carriageway and interracting with other road users

... are not really road users after all.

Table 1: TSGB data

The Results

The distances travelled by each type of transport are shown in Figure 1. As the distance travelled by cycling has slowly decreased the distance travelled by car has risen very fast, from approximately the same level. To replace a substantial proportion of today's car journeys with bicycles, therefore, will require more than just a few dangerous cycle paths and cycle lanes. Motorbikes have always made up a small proportion of the total journey distance travelled.

Figure 1: Distances travelled by vehicle type

This is supported by the same data re-presented in Figure 2. This shows how the modal shares of each vehicle type have varied over the years. In the later 1940s and early 1950s, cycling and cars had an approximately equal share of distance travelled. By 2006, the last year for which data is available, the two forms of transport had radically different shares of distance. The proportion of distance travelled by motorbikes has also dropped dramatically.

Figure 2: Distance shares by vehicle type

The fatality rate per billion kilometres is shown in Figure 3. All three types of vehicles have experienced a reduction in fatality rates over the period, but in different rates. The car rate has dropped slowly. The motorbike rate dropped in the early 1980s, some ten years before the introduction of the Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) certificate. It is not know why this occurred. Cycling fatalities peaked in 1960s.

Figure 3: Fatality rate per billion kilometres by vehicle type