An online survey asking for views closes this Friday and can be accessed here.

“We are extremely pleased to see this study going ahead,” said David Davies of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety. “We favour an overall target for the number of deaths and probably a second covering serious injuries, but not micro targets for each road user group.

“A 50% reduction in the number of road traffic deaths by 2030 – as agreed by the UN’s ‘Stockholm Declaration’ in February – would be a good target for the UK.”

David added that many parts of the UK including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do already have casualty reduction targets, but that targets for England or the UK as a whole are necessary to focus the Government’s efforts to make roads safer.

National casualty reduction targets were scrapped by the Coalition Government during the early part of the last decade.

Road Safety GB chair Liz Brooker welcomed the research being carried out. She added: “The use of targets in road safety casualty reduction can act as a tool to ensure stakeholders – and more importantly decision makers and funders – remain committed to reducing the number of fatalities and serious life changing events on our roads.”

Liz also said that while targets will not reduce crashes on our roads, they will demonstrate a commitment to reducing death and injury. They will also, she continued, “help road safety professionals ensure this remains a clear priority and show a lead from Government to ensure casualty reduction stays high on the list of funding priorities”.

Questions asked as part of the new study include ‘are existing road safety targets realistic?’ and ‘did the adoption of road safety targets increase motivation to improve rad safety from key decision makers?’

Work on the latest study follows a commitment last July from the former Transport Minister Michael Ellis to consider whether “a performance framework” of road casualty reduction targets and safety performance indicators should be adopted for the UK.

He wrote that some countries with targets are reducing their casualties, but understood that others with targets have casualty numbers that remain at the same level. “We need to understand this in detail”, he added, “to establish if there is any evidence to support their effectiveness in road safety improvements”.

(Photograph: Philip Brookes - Shutterstock)