Safety

The M1, Britain's first major motorway, opened in 1959. Since then, the number of vehicles on the roads has quadrupled, and the total vehicle mileage increased fivefold. Yet the number of fatalities on our roads has almost halved - from 6520 in 1959 to 3508 in 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Obviously there are a number of factors behind this improvement, including better vehicle design, improved driver training and more effective policing of behaviour such as drink-driving. But road improvements must also have played a major role. It is impossible to imagine the single-carriageway arterial roads of the 1950s handling anything like the current volume of traffic safely or efficiently. Motorways, although they are our fastest roads, are also by far our safest in terms of number of casualties per vehicle-kilometre.

Indeed, in recent years, as new road openings have dwindled to a trickle, the annual decline in road fatalities has flattened out. 3621 people died on the roads in 1995, 3508 in 2003.

Better roads help improve safety in a number of ways:

• taking through traffic out of built-up areas and away from schools, shops and hospitals
• reducing driver frustration by eliminating traffic jams and providing safe overtaking opportunities
• providing more consistent and forgiving road design, with clear sightlines and no steep hills or deceptive bends
• avoiding risky turning movements at junctions by the provision of flyovers and underpasses

Increased investment in building new roads and improving existing ones must be a vital element in reducing road casualties still further in the future.