Safer roads

The National Speed Limit of 60mph still applies on country lanes like this one. Photo: © CPRE

When was the last time you felt safe walking, riding or cycling on a country road? Was it just before another driver came racing round a corner, having assumed wrongly there was no one else using the road? If so you are not alone: our Rural Traffic Fear Survey showed that two-thirds of people feel threatened by motor traffic all or some of the time on rural roads.

In 2009 the Department for Transport (DfT) consulted on its new Road Safety Strategy called A Safer Way: Making Britain’s Roads the Safest in the World. The draft strategy set out a vision for the next twenty years and targets for the next decade.  CPRE mounted a vibrant campaign and over half the written responses to teh consultation were based on our key points.

> DfT website: A Safer Way

The issues

Almost two-thirds of road deaths now occur on rural roads and the new strategy does indeed acknowledge this problem. But despite media reports to the contrary, no reduction in national speed limits is proposed. Instead the DfT plans to ‘encourage local authorities to consider’ reducing local speed limits on main roads (except in towns) and in residential areas, by proposing to rewrite some of its guidance in the future.

Country lanes, typically C and Unclassified roads, do not even feature in the new strategy.  They will keep a 60mph speed limit unless authorities can afford covering them with repeater signs indicating a local lower speed limit. In a report last year, the House of Commons Transport Committee highlighted the need for more funding and less regulation to make implementing lower speed limits on all types of road easier so it is particularly disappointing that this long-awaited consultation has not proposed anything in response.

> Transport Committee website: Ending the Scandal of Complacency: Road Safety beyond 2010

the proposal to produce maps showing where collisions have taken place on A roads are a welcome start. However, A roads only make up a small proportion of the national road network. Many people are too intimidated by motor traffic to walk, ride or cycle on roads and lanes. So mapping collisions will not show where collision rates are low because people feel too unsafe to go in the first place.

> Eurorap: Publication of 2010 GB Road Risk Maps

Efforts to improve road safety have focused on collision hotspots rather than along whole routes. Not only are the measures taken sometimes unsightly or even ugly, A Safer Way confirms that they have become less effective as crashes have become spread out across rural areas rather than concentrated in particular hotspots.   

Our view

Speed policy should not just be about reducing the number of people Killed or Seriously Injured on the roads. Indeed how can we even claim to aim for the ‘safest roads in the world’, if people are still too scared to use them unless encased in a metal chassis?

Speed policy must involve joined-up thinking and consider the effects of changing speed limits on quality of life and the natural environment, such as by reducing noise pollution, signage clutter, traffic intimidation and greenhouse gas emissions.

In 1999 during the consultation on the current strategy, we highlighted the problems on rural roads and then secured changes to the Transport Act 2000.  However the Government has been dragging its feet since and proposals for a ‘rural road hierarchy’ have not come to anything. Aside from a few demonstration projects, little seems to have changed beyond the publication of new reports and guidance.

CPRE is highlighting the following key points:

1. National Speed Limit: We want to see the default national speed limit lowered to 50mph on rural single carriageways but giving authorities discretion to keep the safest rural roads at 60mph for cars and motorcycles where they can justify this. One way of doing this may be to abolish the National Speed Limit Applies sign, which fewer than half of drivers understand. Lorries, buses and vans are not allowed to exceed 50mph on single carriageways but because speed cameras are set at a particular threshold, typically 68mph, enforcement is non-existent. 
2. New lower speed zones: We want to see new signs introduced for 40mph zones on minor rural roads and it made easier to introduce 20mph zones on residential roads (including in villages) and on Quiet Lanes in the countryside. At present 40mph limits can be introduced on minor roads but they need repeater signs every 300 yards or so.
3. Rural Road Hierarchy: The balance between flexibility locally and consistency nationally is best achieved by a move to more of a road hierarchy. This means making it clearer what type of road you are on through signage and speed limits used: through routes for long distance travel, mixed routes, or access routes where local needs take priority.  Roads with a higher function must make safe and convenient provision for non-motorised road users.
4. ‘Self-explaining roads’: Current traffic engineering seems just to hector and bully motorists with everything from endless SLOW markings to mysterious ‘dragon’s teeth’. Effective persuasion needs to use more subtle psychological means to influence behaviour as constant shouting at drivers just makes them switch off. The emphasis should shift from ‘self-enforcing’ to ‘self-explaining’ roads.
5. Traffic intimidation: There needs to be surveying of ‘traffic intimidation’ – fear of being injured from a collision – so that action can be taken without there having to be a death or serious injury from a road traffic collision first.  This is particularly important for rural areas where accessing public transport may involve a long walk along country lanes with no footways.
6. Rural proofing: Proposals for a new target for walking and cycling will not pick up rural problems.  Cycling is three times more dangerous on rural as opposed to urban roads but because there is more cycling on urban roads, improvements in urban areas could mask increased danger in rural areas.  We need separate targets both for urban and rural roads and for walking and cycling.
7. Laws and liability: We need reform of road users’ civil liability and review recent changes to criminal liability in the Road Safety Act 2006. This would give greater protection to vulnerable road users and encourage a northern European culture of ‘sharing the road’.  Raising 'awareness' of other road users is not enough, requiring 'consideration' for them is needed.

Take Action

Here are some ways you can take action:

• Write to your MP to ask them to call the government for an ambitious new road safety strategy.
• Write to your local council’s transport department to ask how they will be reducing speed limits in their next Local Transport Plan, which they are due to start preparing this summer for implementation in 2011.
• Write to your local councillors to encourage them to make safer roads their priority.  Many areas had elections in May 2010, so why not ask write to your new councillor to suggest they make tackling speed a commitment.
• Write to your local newspaper to raise the problems that speeding causes locally and suggest lower speed limits.

Sign up to Campaigns Update – e-newsletter

Each month, you'll receive our Campaigns Update telling you about our successes and struggles in campaigning for England's beautiful countryside. Get the inside story on what CPRE is up to and how you might be able to help us.
> More about Campaigns Update