Today's announcement of the 2005 road crash figures show clearly that current road safety policy needs to change, says road safety group the Association of British Drivers. Despite millions spent on speed reduction measures, pedestrian deaths are unchanged from 2004; just as many drivers are dying; and cyclist fatalities increased by 10%. Just 20 fewer people died on the UK's roads.
 
The ABD believes these figures — coming close after Oxford University statistics showing no real reductions in road injury statistics — are profoundly damning of current road safety policy.
 
Mark McArthur-Christie, the ABD's Director of Policy said today

"Since the early 1990s, policy has majored on compliance with speed limits above all else and now we're paying the price in lives. We have a road safety policy that is a lame one-trick pony, simply because it fails to recognise the complexity of the driving and riding tasks."

The ABD believes that by concentrating almost exclusively on external speed controls (bumps, lower limits, cameras) vital aspects of road safety have been missed. The group argues that before we can have safer roads, we need to recognise three key things:

• that driving and riding safely are extremely complex mental and physical processes;
• that the massive concentration on external controls has had little impact on safe driving;
• and that those external controls have very serious side effects.

McArthur-Christie comments

"These figures show that we need to completely change the way we think about road safety. It simply cannot be imposed from the outside with humps, bumps, cameras and lower limits. These are all effective in making drivers legally compliant, but not safe. If we want safe roads, we must recognise that safe driving and riding are complex mental processes that can't be summed up by "speed kills"."

The ABD believes that the best way of saving casualties lies in engineering out road hazards, better driver education and a more enlightened approach to enforcement. Its full safety Manifesto can be found on www.abd.org.uk.