Road Traffic Safety - Criticisms

Criticisms

Some road-safety groups argue that the problem of road safety is largely being stated in the wrong terms because most road safety measures are designed to increase the safety of drivers, but many road traffic casualties are not drivers (in the UK only 40% of casualties are drivers), and those measures which increase driver safety may, perversely, increase the risk to these others, through risk compensation.

The core elements of the thesis are:

• that vulnerable road users are marginalised by the "road safety" establishment
• that "road safety" interventions are often centred around reducing the severity of results from dangerous behaviours, rather than reducing the dangerous behaviours themselves
• that improved "road safety" has often been achieved by making the roads so hostile that those most likely to be injured cannot use them at all
• that the increasing "safety" of cars and roads is often counteracted wholly or in part by driver responses (risk compensation).

RoadPeace and other groups have been strongly critical of what they see as moves to solve the problem of danger posed to vulnerable road users by motor traffic through increasing restrictions on vulnerable road users, an approach which they believe both blames the victim and fails to address the problem at source. This is discussed in detail by Dr Robert Davis in the book Death on the Streets: Cars and the mythology of road safety, and the core problem is also addressed in books by Professor John Adams, Mayer Hillman and others.

For example; the UK publishes Road Casualties Great Britain each year detailing reported road fatalities and injuries and claims to have among the best pedestrian safety in Europe with falling injury rates, as measured in pedestrian KSI per head of population. A study published by the British Medical Journal in 2006 suggested that the reduction in injury levels was due to lower levels of reporting not reducing levels of injury as such. Considerable under-reporting was confirmed by a second report prepared for the UK Department for Transport. and the UK government now acknowledges the issue of under-reporting but is not convinced that the reductions in reported injury levels do not reflect an actual decline. Another independent report investigated if the roads were actually sufficiently dangerous as to deter pedestrians from using them at all.