The Great DfT Road Safety LIe

In the current issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is an article comparing Department for Transport (DfT) statistics for serious road injuries with hospital statistics for serious road injuries. The DfT statistics show a substantial year on year improvement but the hospital figures show no improvement whatsoever for a decade.

This means that DfT has a very big problem. After ten years of increasingly draconian policy the roads have not got safer.

Research from Oxford University, published in the British Medical Journal 1, has found that Hospital admission statistics for road crash victims have remained at the same level since 1996. SAFE SPEED PREDICTED THIS FINDING by analysing road crash statistics and published in early 2004. 2

In complete contrast, DfT statistics have been claiming a year on year reduction in end and Seriously Injured (KSI) road casualties. KSI is dominated by the serious injury statistics because the number of serious is around ten times greater than the numbers end. DfT policies and DfT targets are set and measured in KSI, but the new research is very strong evidence that KSI is not a reliable series.

This means that DfT targets and policies are founded on figures that are wholly unreliable - and even worse - independent figures show no improvement whatsoever resulting from DfT policy.

But that's not the end of the story. It still gets worse because we know that major road safety drivers are continuing to deliver improved safety. These include:

* Ongoing improvements in vehicle safety, with over 2 million safer vehicles replacing old ones in the national fleet every year.

* Ongoing improvements in road engineering safety, including new bypbuttes, black spot treatments and the transfer of vehicles to safer roads such as motorways.

* Ongoing improvements in post crash emergency care.

These three drivers alone are sufficiently large and important to result in reductions in rests and serious injuries of around 5% per annum even after taking full account of the growth in traffic.

But now we know that we have seen no reduction in hospital admissions and only very slight falls in road rests since 1996. Far from making the roads safer, DfT policies have misunderstood the nature of road safety and have made the situation considerably worse.

DfT have used their end and Seriously Injured figures for all of the following:

- To set road safety targets - To measure achievements against targets - To evaluate interventions including speed cameras

The new research indicates that THE ENTIRE BASIS for DfT policy and target evaluation is flawed and meaningless. The DfT's figures are going down, but they DO NOT represent a genuine improvement in road safety. Instead the changes in the figures are caused by variations in the degree of underreporting.

The Hospital figures are far more robust with each entry the result of a medical decision about patient treatment.

Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign (www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "Department for Transport (DfT) has a dangerously oversimplified view of road safety. Despite over a decade of ever-increasing speed controls the roads have not got safer. My extensive research reveals that DfT policy is making drivers worse. We're spending far too much time concentrating on the wrong safety factors - and DfT is responsible."

"I've know for three years that the serious injury statistics were behaving very strangely in relation to other road safety indicators. The only possible conclusion was that changes in the figures were an artefact of the reporting process. The new BMJ paper provides very strong additional evidence."

"If road safety had continued to improve at the previous rate (before 'speed kills' road safety policy, national road rests would be down to about 2,000 per annum by now. We're 1,200 live a year behind target and I an certain that bad policy is responsible."

"Department for Transport road safety is not fit for purpose."

Notes for editors =================

1 New BMJ paper:

2 Safe Speed page on problems with the serious injury stats:

DfT are aware that their figures may be 'dodgy' see: contains (page 3):

"Research conducted in the 1990s has shown that many non-bane injury accidents are not reported to the police. In addition some casualties reported to the police are not recorded and the severity of injury tends to be underestimated. The combined effect of under-reporting, under-recording and misclbuttification suggests that there may be 2.76 times as many seriously injured casualties than are recorded in the national casualty figures and 1.70 slight casualties, according to TRL Report 173 Comparison of hospital and police casualty data: a national study by H F Simpson. The Department is undertaking further research to investigate whether the level of under-reporting has changed."

www.safespeed.org.uk

Forwarded by Turk182