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Motoring news

Charity calls for 'zero tolerance' on road deaths

17/12/2009

Road safety charity Brake has called for action on "one of the worst social ills in our country" after the production of an interactive map charting all UK road deaths over the last decade.

The BBC's map - Crash: death on Britain's roads - displays all of the 32,298 deaths that took place from 1999 to 2008, plotting where in the UK each took place. Users can search by police authority region or by post code and look at a yearly breakdown of accidents in their area.

And the BBC has included links to news stories for some of the most recent fatalities, "to convey some of the grim reality behind the statistics". These show that 2,538 people died on UK roads last year - after a steady fall from the decade's high point in 2003, when 3,508 people lost their lives.

And the Government has already met its own targets for reducing road deaths and casualties by 2010. Its 'toolkit' for the years after 2010, A Safer Way, has the goal of making Britain's roads the safest in the world.

Road safety has received sustained attention recently, with international ministers meeting for the first time to specifically address the issue, resulting in a call for 2011-2020 to be designated a global 'road safety decade'.

But more still needs to be done, according to Cathy Keeler, deputy chief executive of Brake.

"We know that communities are terribly concerned about the road deaths they see reported week in, week out in their local papers," she said.

"If more than 30,000 people had been killed on trains or planes in the last 10 years there would be a national outcry and politicians would be falling over themselves in the rush to implement policies to stop the carnage.

"We need politicians with a vision of a society that does not tolerate death or injury on roads, and the will to take positive action to ensure that no-one's love of risk-taking on roads endangers anyone's right to life."