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During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, travelling safely to stories has always been paramount, but now comes new research which shows that a huge decline in road deaths has stalled.
You always used to jump in the car knowing you would arrive safely, and quickly at the place where the story was.
In news you had to be there in minutes, and in Current Affairs television you had to keep to the day’s filming schedule, so catching the train was never an option.
You always possessed the knowledge that the UK lead the world in road safety.
Between 1960 and 2000 (I began my journalistic career in 1983) the number of people who died in road collisions fell by half, with the decline in deaths per mile travelled even more dramatic.
By 2010 Britain’s roads were, along with Sweden’s, the safest in the world.
However progress has since stalled.
Whereas Sweden implemented “Vision Zero” (a goal of reducing deaths to nil) in 2011 the Conservative-led UK Government ditched its road-safety target altogether.
Road deaths are now a third higher per mile travelled than in the Scandinavian country that invented the three-point seatbelt.
In 2023, 1,624 people died on Britain’s roads and another 26,000 suffered serious, often life-changing injuries.
Road collisions cost the UK about £40 billion (or 1.5 per cent of GDP) each year, which includes an estimate of the value of lost life-years.
They are the second-most-common cause of death among men in their 20s after suicide.
Repairs would be a good starting-point because roads are in a dire state.
They are blighted by potholes, landslips and bad signage, and a UK parliamentary committee report published on January 17 labelled the entire road network a “national embarrassment”.
In December the UK Government announced £1.6 billion in funding to fill potholes.
It will soon be swallowed up, because the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), a body for bitumen buffs, declares that 10 times this is needed with the backlog of repairs on Britain’s roads.
Then there is the issue of how bad the roads are in certain areas even without potholes.
Although roads are far safer than they were a generation ago, plenty of black spots remain.
Since 2018 the UK Government have given councils £186 million to improve 99 stretches of road.
The scheme aims to reduce the number of people who are killed and seriously injured by 2,600 over 20 years.
But the Road Safety Foundation (RSF) calculates that £2.5 billion is needed to prevent a further 17,000 deaths or serious injuries over a 20-year period.
Or how about cutting the speed limit?
In Wales the reduction from 30 mph to 20 mph in certain areas may have been chaotically introduced, but it has lead to a significant decrease in accidents.
There were around 100 fewer people killed or seriously injured on roads with 20 and 30 mph limits in the 12 months after the introduction of the lower speed compared with the same period the year before.
The question, declares Suzy Charman of the Road Safety Foundation (RSF), is “how much death and serious injury is society willing to tolerate?“.
A good question – almost as important as knowing you could jump in the car and arrive safely at your destination in the old days…
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when travelling to stories was all-important) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
