Zeroing in on the Government’s lack of a road safety casualty reduction target

The Government’s Strategic Framework for Road Safety came in for strong criticism at a conference last month, with the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, which organised the event, calling for the UK to adopt a ‘Vision Zero’ approach to road safety modelled on Dutch and Swedish thinking on the subject

Rik Thomas

13 April 2012

Professor Oliver Carsten from the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds castigated the DfT’s obsession with the ‘blame and train’ philosophy of accident reduction

The nation’s road safety community would appear to be becoming increasingly uneasy about the current Government’s attitudes towards road safety, at least if the trend of key comments at the PACTS ‘Aiming for Zero’ conference held in London last month is anything to go by.

The tone was, indeed, very much set by PACTS’ executive director, Robert Gifford, in an introductory letter to conference delegates. “This conference comes, in my view, at an interesting...