National Signposts Report 2012

There has been a well-documented reduction in the number of crashes and casualties recorded on the roads of Great Britain over the last decade. Furthermore, the rate of crashes per billion vehicle miles and casualties per head of population has also decreased. These measures form a part of the Outcomes Framework as defined by the Strategic Framework for Road Safety which was published in May 2011. There are a series of national indicators that measure fatality rates per billion vehicle miles as well as local indicators that measure performance against casualties who were killed or seriously injured (KSI). All of the national indicators use a baseline of 2005 – 2009 and simply compare performance in the most recent year against this benchmark.

Road Safety Analysis (RSA) has been at the forefront of providing local authorities with better comparison tools and more powerful analysis systems that allow greater insight into performance through MAST Online and MAST Mapping. Last year RSA contributed to the evidence that went before the Transport Select Committee arguing for better performance measures than the Key Outcome Indicators currently published by the Department for Transport and the need for ongoing monitoring of local performance to be published. The purpose of these enhancements would be to ensure that progress was being maintained and focus on reducing road injuries could not be overlooked by authorities experiencing financial constraint.

In 2011 RSA also published a suite of 116 maps highlighting the difference in performance between local authorities in the period 2006 – 2010. These analyses looked at crashes and casualties by crash location as well as, and perhaps more importantly, casualties based on residency. These ‘topics’ were then broken down into themed measures for at-risk groups such as pedestrians, cyclists and child casualties. These maps provided instant answers for local authorities who were now able to judge their own performance against national baselines on a number of important measures.

In 2012 this analysis has been updated to include 2011 data and improved, making it easier to interpret and the rate based analysis has been refined by the use of more relevant denominators where available. The most significant difference is the introduction of an improvement index which measures change between the first three years (2006 – 2008) and the most recent three years (2009 – 2011). These improvement indices are available for measures where significant numbers of crashes and casualties are available at a local level. Measures where numbers are relatively small are only shown as national indices, for example in the case of pedal cyclists.

This report concentrates on two of the measures, all resident casualties and all crashes. All of the other analyses are made available to MAST Members via the online GIS portal where they can browse results and download the raw data or thematic maps for use in local reporting. For any authority or interested parties who recognise the benefit of a localised report, these are available from the RSA website.