Road Safety

Thursday 21st March 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Stephen Hammond)]

I am today launching two new websites: the road safety comparison site and the road safety observatory.

The road safety comparison site will help the public and road safety professionals compare the road safety performance of local authorities. We also committed to part-funding the road safety observatory, which provides access to academic road safety research. In launching these two new sites we are fulfilling our commitment made in the “Strategic Framework for Road Safety” published 11 May 2011.

The road safety comparison site makes clear to the public, local authorities and other partners how a local highway authority is performing by putting collision and casualty numbers into context. By setting those numbers against population, traffic levels, road length and authority spend we have produced a set of indicators showing performance over the last seven years and where that authority stands against others. The site also provides a mapping facility that can be filtered so that a user can, for example, see how many cyclists or children have been involved in collisions on a particular road.

The road safety observatory provides a resource for professionals and practitioners, giving them the access to empirical road safety research by taking that research and summarising it in plain English. This site has been part funded by the Department and the project run by a board drawn from various road safety bodies, including RoadSafe, the Parliamentary Accounts Committee for Transport Safety (PACTS), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), the RAC Foundation, the Association of Directors for the Environment, Planning and Transport (ADEPT), Road Safety GB, the South West Public Health Observatory, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Automobile Association.

The observatory will be a live site and will be updated as and when new research is produced.