Manchester Statistical Society, Occasional Paper, July 1992.

Many fundamental and closely-related assumptions underlying transport and road safety policy are derived from surveys conducted and statistical data collected regularly by the Department of Transport. The findings are used principally as an aid to the formation of government policy and for monitoring progress on its implementation.

This paper examines a selection of these sources from the viewpoint of their adequacy and appropriateness for these purposes, revealing that they are often unreliable and lack comprehensiveness. It proceeds to suggest that the way they are interpreted distorts perceptions of the direction that public policy should be taking.

Road safety
Serious grounds for concern can be expressed about the methods used in gathering and presenting road accident statistics. This holds true not only in terms of the application of the statistics for determining trends and comparisons with other countries, but more particularly because of the significance attached to them.

Take the definitions used in road accident data. These are precise: casualties are recorded as fatal if they are human and result in death less than 30 days after an accident which involves a road vehicle on a public highway or footpath. Thus, a drunken motorist who drives into a lamppost and dies is included in the statistics, but an elderly pedestrian who has a serious fall after tripping on an ill-fitting paving flag and dies is excluded. Further insight into the minds of those who decide on which casualties are to be incorporated in road accident statistics may be gained from the fact that, although we pride ourselves on our concern for animal welfare, no attempt is made to keep any record of domestic pets or farm or feral animals killed as a result of being hit by a motor vehicle. Yet it is widely known that these are frequent and almost invariably fatal.

The term ‘serious injury’ covers an extraordinarily wide band of severity ranging from one where an accident results in severe cuts and lacerations, or in general shock requiring medical treatment not necessarily in hospital , to one which results in death after 30 days. As a result, no change from one year to another in the incidence of serious injuries could simply be masking increases or decreases in their actual severity. We have no way of knowing. The term slight injury covers such damage as a sprain, bruise, cut or a slight shock that does not even require medical attention and, for this reason, is of far less consequence than injuries of a more serious nature. Yet it is not unusual for the number of casualties according to all severities to be cited in discussion of aspects of road safety policy or practice.

To compound the problem of evaluating the significance of these statistics, thereby lowering confidence in their usefulness, it should be noted that the accidents are recorded on standardised forms detailing the circumstances of the accident, with the decision about the severity of the injury being made by the policeman filling in the form ‘on the basis of information available within a short time of the accident’.

A further substantial blurring of the reliability of the published figures which are intended to accurately reflect the number and severity of personal injury accidents stems from the fact that the police are not always aware of these accidents and are therefore not in a position to take details. Several studies conducted in recent years have revealed that a high proportion of non-fatal injury accidents go unreported, especially those involving pedestrians and cyclists. A hospital-based study of road accident casualties covering the whole of Oxfordshire established that the overall number of casualties among all road users reported to the police was only 58 per cent of the number who attended hospital. The rate of reporting of injuries varied both by accident severity and by road user type. In the case of single vehicle accidents, 75 per cent of injury accidents involving the vehicle occupants were reported to the police in contrast to only 35 and 3 per cent respectively for motor cyclists and pedal cyclists. The study also established that the degree of severity recorded on the police forms was generally exaggerated, with slight injuries often being set down as severe.

Given the wide range of degrees of bodily harm covered by the definitions and the substantial level of under-reporting, it would seem to be highly desirable to make comparisons and reach judgements on changes in public policy on the basis of fatalities only, all of which are unsurprisingly registered. The fact that, of course, samples based on fatalities often tend to be too small for disaggregation should not be allowed to justify analysis and policy implications being drawn from the spurious figures on injuries recorded as serious and slight.

The safest areas in which to travel
The significance of this issue can be made apparent by considering one area of road safety policy derived from the overall casualty figures. These are often used to justify road building as it can be shown that the casualty rate on new roads, and particularly motorways, is generally lower than on existing urban roads. They are also used in making decisions on what is intended to be cost-effective investment to improve road safety.

Which are the safest areas of Britain from the viewpoint of road travel? The form in which the official road accident statistics are presented, ostensibly to allow comparisons of the relative danger on roads in different counties and metropolitan districts in Britain, is in fact useless to answer this question. Its value lies only in allowing trends in casualty rates within any county to be observed for neither traffic levels nor populations are used which would enable casualty rates per vehicle, passenger kilometre or per head of population, to be determined. Even then, reservations remain about their reliability on the grounds set out earlier.

However, by relating population figures to road casualty figures, that rate can be determined. Table 1 shows that, in some instances, the fatality rate and the casualty rate per head of population sometimes match in inter-county comparisons: for example, it can be seen that both the fatality rate and casualty rate in the Lothians are the highest in Britain and, in both instances, are the lowest in the Western Isles. On the other hand, Scotland has the highest fatality rate but the lowest casualty rate.

Given the relatively high levels of household car ownership in SE England and the high volume of motor traffic in Greater London, it is thought that the casualty rate there must be among the highest in the country. It is assumed that there is a higher risk of death on the capital’s roads because of the density of traffic and the exceptional exposure of pedestrians to that traffic. Clearly that is incorrect. It can be seen in the Table that Greater London has a relatively high casualty rate but an unusually low fatality rate.

Table 3. Fatality rates by vehicle user.

	fatalities per 100,000 vehicle kilometres
Vehicle type	vehicle user	pedestrian	other vehicles	all other	fatalities as prop. of all
Bicycle	4.9	0.1	0.1	5.1	4%
TWMV1	10.3	1.7	0.6	12.6	18%
Car	0.7	0.4	0.4	1.5	53%
Light goods	0.4	0.4	0.6	1.4	71%
Bus or coach	0.4	1.8	1.7	3.9	90%
Heavy lorry	0.2	0.5	1.9	2.6	93%

---

¹Two-wheeled motor vehicle.
Source: Department of Transport, Road Accidents, Great Britain 1990: The Casualty Report, 1991, London, HMSO.

The Table reveals an almost complete reversal of the relative danger and safety of travel by each of these vehicle types. Whereas the fatality rates for people in buses and heavy lorries are the lowest of all road users, use of these vehicles is associated with the highest proportion of fatalities among pedestrians and other road users: for instance, for every person killed per person km in a heavy lorry, 13 other road users are killed, whereas for every cyclist killed per cycle km, only 1 in 24 other road users are killed.

Thus, the Table enables, for the first time, a meaningful appreciation of the relationship between the risk per kilometre for each class of road user in relation to each other class, that is the risk incorporating fatalities among all road users. In this way, policy makers are more pertinently informed of the risks to society of the different travel methods rather than the risk to the user of any particular method.

Whose lives are most at risk in road accidents?
Whilst there is understandable concern about the disturbingly high pedestrian casualty rate among children, the way in which statistics are presented gives a misleading impression of the most vulnerable group of road users. Neither politicians nor the general public are aware of the fact that, as Table 4 shows, this rate is highest among elderly people. Indeed, analysis of data from road accident statistics and the National Travel Survey shows that the fatality rate for young pensioners per kilometre walked is about twice as high as that among children, and the rate for old pensioners is about ten times as high.

Table 4. Pedestrian fatality rate per kilometre and per capita, by age group.

	pedestrian fatality rate
Age group	per 100 million kilometres	per 100 thousand population	% of population
0-4	4.6	1.6
5-9	8.4	2.7	18.8
10-14	5.1	2.8
15-19	3.7	2.3	7.9
20-59	4.5	1.7	52.5
60-64	8.7	3.3
65-69	10.7	4.3	20.8
70-74	22.5	7.3
75+	66.4	12.0
All pedestrians	7.9	3.1	100

Source: O’Donoghue, J., ‘Pedestrian Casualties’, in Road Accidents Great Britain 1987, 1988, London, HMSO, and further analysis of road accident statistics.

The significance of these figures for policy on making the pedestrian environment safer, perhaps by reversing the priority at road intersections through raising their levels to pavement height – in effect, combining the function of the pedestrian crossing with that of the sleeping policeman – is brought sharply into focus when it is realised that the fatality rate per kilometre of old pensioners getting about on foot is six times as high as that of motor cyclists – most of whom are young men.

The measure of road safety
Perhaps the most important grounds for concern about road safety in this country, and indeed around the world, stems from the assumption that the only measure of safety or danger on the roads that is required for assessing the success or failure of policy is the number of accidents on the roads. It apparently stands to reason: safe roads have few if any accidents on them whereas dangerous roads have many accidents on them.

In an article prefacing last year’s report of the Department of Transport’s Road Accidents Great Britain, there is a discussion by a member of its Statistics Directorate on the many different ways that the Department sees that safety can be measured. From the simple base of the number of people killed or injured, it goes on to show that more useful figures can be derived if there is a suitable denominator so that rates can be determined, for instance, the casualty rate per numbers in the population, per vehicle kilometre, per passenger kilometre, per hour of exposure and so on. It then sets out detailed tables according to these measures, and seemingly implies that, one way or another, safety is comprehensively reflected in these data sets.

The danger of relying on these data as the sole measure of road safety in the formation of policy is well illustrated by reference to the recent Department of Transport brochure entitled Safety on the Move. This included the claim that “… over the last 25 years, our roads have become much safer”, and seemingly sought to substantiate this with the statistics that “… Road accidents have fallen by almost 20 per cent since the mid-1960s; the number of deaths is down by one third. At the same time traffic has more than doubled.”

One may wonder whether the author of this brochure, his or her superiors or ‘inferiors’ who presumably checked it in draft, or indeed Cecil Parkinson, the Secretary of State for Transport at the time who wrote the Foreword, stopped to think for one moment that these statistics could not conceivably substantiate the claim. How could anyone knowing that traffic levels have more than doubled during this period (and knowing that traffic speeds generally have risen too) conclude that “our roads have become much safer”? Was there perhaps a subconscious resistance to thinking through the apparent paradox, implying as it must a radical re-assessment of the tenet of faith of those responsible for road safety policy on which it has been based for so long – like the Church in the 19th century finding it difficult to come to terms with Darwin’s theory of evolution?

Last year, we replicated surveys that we had previously conducted 20 years earlier among children in schools around the country. The separate questionnaires for the children and their parents recorded the extent to which the children were allowed to cross roads, go to and from school and generally make journeys on their own, and cycle on main roads (if a bicycle were owned).

We showed that part of the reason why both the number of child fatalities and the fatality rate per kilometre they travel and per head of population have fallen sharply in spite of the considerable increase in traffic is explained by parents modifying their children’s and their own behaviour in view of their logical perceptions of an increasingly unsafe environment. In the face of this, as we established, they have made two changes: first, they have progressively withdrawn their children from the risk of injury by limiting their freedom – a freedom which is incidentally cited as a justification for welcoming the growth of car ownership and use. And second, they have had to take on the often tedious and time-consuming escort burden which is thereby necessitated.

We found that, whereas in 1971, 80 per cent of the seven and eight year olds were allowed to go to school without adult supervision, by 1990, this figure had fallen to 9 per cent. The response clearly indicated that the wide and increasing restrictions on the children’s independent mobility were a direct result of parental fears, in the main of involvement in a road accident, though molestation was a secondary reason cited. It seemed to us that parental perceptions of the changes in the level of safety on the roads over the years, rather than road accident statistics, may well be a better source for determining whether our roads have become safer or more dangerous.

Our research suggests that if current road safety policy continues to be judged according to the degree to which the government-set target of reducing accidents by one third by the end of the decade is being achieved, it is likely to be focused on the wrong target. Success may have been won not because our roads have been made safer but because the growth of traffic has made them more dangerous!

In the light of this research, we have argued that there is a clear need for new indicators of road safety to be adopted. We put some forward in the conclusions of our study, such as simply changes in traffic volumes on selected classes of road, or changes over time in the proportion of children of selected ages who are allowed to cross roads, come home from school on their own or use their bicycles on the roads. We considered that these indicators would more appropriately reflect road safety than the number of fatalities and injuries, that is the perception of the risk of injury on the roads. Had such indicators been employed to monitor the effects of road safety policy over the last 20 years, the results would be pointing to its failure in that it would have been apparent that our roads have become more dangerous and children have been in effect called upon to pay the price for our adult mobility by having their freedoms dramatically curtailed.

Transport policy
If attention is turned to the statistics upon which transport policy rather than road safety policy is based, equivalently disconcerting observations can be reached about the distorting impact they have had.

Are long or short journeys preferable?
Cabinet Ministers have argued on many occasions that growth in traffic and in the demand for road transport, particularly for cars, are symptoms of the success of the British economy. There is an implicit assumption in current transport policy that longer journeys are more ‘important’ than shorter ones. It follows then that a better rate of return on investments will be achieved by increasing speed and reducing delay on longer journeys.

The principal use to which the findings of the National Travel Survey (NTS) are put is for the purpose of recognising trends in the demand for motorised travel and therefore in order to plan to accommodate this in the future road building programme. For this reason, the NTS report concentrates on travel distance, giving disproportionate attention to ‘longer journeys’. In an easily overlooked Note prefacing the latest report on the NTS, it is pointed out that journeys of under a mile only account for three per cent of all personal travel mileage and that “most of these are walks” – with the implication that they are of little consequence even though, from an ecological perspective, shorter journeys, most of which are made by non-motorised modes, are the ones that it is most in the public interest to promote.

The omission of these ‘very short’ (sic) journeys leads to a very different image of the distribution of journeys by mode: Table 5 compares this distribution for each main mode, including and excluding journeys of under a mile. It can be seen that it results in the significance of the non-motorised modes, particularly those on foot, and of course the travel of those more heavily dependent on them, being seriously under-represented. Thus, of all journeys, the proportion made on foot is reduced to a third of its actual level, whilst the proportion for those by car is increased from half to over two-thirds.

Table 5. Distribution of journeys by mode including and excluding journeys of under one mile, 1985/86.

	Journeys of under one mile
Mode	Included %	Excluded %
Walk	34	11
Cycle	3	2
Bus	9	11
Car	51	69
Other	4	7
All	100	100

Source: special calculations from published figures in Department of Transport, National Travel Survey: 1985/86 Report, op.cit.

As Table 6 shows, over a third of the journeys that people make cover distances of under a mile, including nearly half of the journeys of children and nearly two-fifths of those of people over the age of 60 years. It can be seen too that roughly three-quarters of these shorter journeys are made on foot or by bicycle.

Table 6. Percentages of journeys by all modes and by walking and cycling, over distances of less than one mile, by age and sex, 1985/86.

	Journeys under one mile
	Children	Elderly	Women	Men	All
Age	0-15	60+	16-59	16-59
% of all journeys	45	38	33	22	33
% of these on foot or cycle	78	78	79	69	76

Source: special calculations from published figures in Department of Transport, 1988.

To compound this error of judgement, the most widely used sources of data on patterns of travel do not incorporate figures on these shorter trips, thereby providing meaningless and distorting bases for the formulation of a sensible transport policy. This can be seen in guidance given by the Department of the Environment aimed at directing local authorities towards public interest decisions on patterns of shopping provision. The relevant document relies on published NTS figures and therefore reports on walking playing only a very minor role, overlooking the fact that nearly half of all shopping trips are made on foot. At the same time, having incorrectly up-graded the significance of longer journeys, mostly by car, the document then emphasises for local authorities the importance of providing sufficient parking space for car-borne shoppers. It goes on to give advice on large stores – the “now well-established form of retail development clearly meeting strong customer demand for convenient car-borne weekly household shopping”. It is disturbing to realise that planning approvals granted with this advice in mind have reduced the viability of local shops that are the most convenient for people who largely depend on walking to get about.

A further effect of the omission is to relegate the non-motorised modes to an inferior position in the transport hierarchy in spite of the fact that, again as with shorter journeys, these are the ones that it is most in the public interest to promote. The very low costs of making provision for walking and cycling compared with motorised travel are then overlooked because of the absence of meaningful data on them.

The lack of appreciation of the significance of walking and cycling in public policy in recent years can also be established by checking through other official documents on transport in which it could be expected that they would feature. Such an examination reveals that few mention them, and those that do typically categorise them in effect as ‘also-rans’. Insofar as walking is considered in policy documents, it tends to be treated primarily as a ‘safety’ problem.

This could be cited as a further explanation for the unsatisfactory outcome of policy as forecasts made in the process of determining plans for meeting future transport demand and expenditure on the plans extraordinarily exclude the non-motorised modes. It would appear that they are not worthy of consideration. Yet, the relevance and reliability of this forecasting process would be considerably improved, and the focus of policy sharpened, if it were simply acknowledged that in the year for which predictions were made, close on 100 per cent of the population will be able to walk and the great majority will be able to cycle and would welcome wider opportunities for doing so if proper provision were made for them in the form of safe networks. In this way, a future role for walking and cycling would be recognised and policy adjusted accordingly.

The significance of public transport and walking
Oversight of the significance of shorter journeys, and walking in particular, leads to the notion that there are basically only two forms of transport for day-to-day travel – car and public transport. The focus of attention is then on road building to cater for the demand for car use and on public transport for people without cars and for situations where there are limits on the demand for car use being met through increasing the vehicle-carrying capacity of the road network, as in the rush hour.

Indeed, most critics of current transport policy argue that one of the key ways of resolving the conflict between traffic growth and its adverse environmental consequences is to greatly improve public transport. In this way, it is thought that car users can be more easily encouraged to transfer back to public transport – or be obliged to do so with less justification for objecting.

Such a judgement stems from a wholly mistaken belief that the growth in car travel has come about as a result of people no longer being prepared to use public transport. However, as can be seen in Table 7, journeys on foot are, even today, three times as frequent as those by all public transport modes combined – a ratio that has not changed in the ten years from the 1975/76 NTS to that of the 1985/86 NTS. The Table also shows that, in spite of the decline in the use of walking and cycling, the ratio is highest among children, and rising, but still high and fairly constant for all adults.

Table 7. Ratio of number of journeys on foot to the number by public transport, by age and sex, 1975/76 and 1985/86.

	National Travel Survey
	1975/761	1985/862
Children	4.5	5.2
Elderly	2.9	2.9
Women (16-59)	2.7	2.8
Men (16-59)	2.7	2.6
All	3.1	3.1

¹special tabulation from the National Travel Survey.
² calculated from published figures in Department of Transport, 1988.

In fact, little of the growth has occurred as a result of people deserting bus or train: over the 20-year period to 1989, car user kilometres have increased by 278 billion (100 per cent), whilst bus passenger kilometres have declined by only 14 billion (25 per cent); and rail passenger kilometres have actually increased by 5 billion (14 per cent). Indeed, for every passenger kilometre apparently ‘lost’ to public transport during these two decades, 31 passenger kilometres have been ‘gained’ by car users.

It is clear that by far the largest change in patterns of travel has resulted from newly-generated travel by car. The expectation that, given sufficient improvement in public transport, people will return to it from the car overlooks the fact that most travel never came from public transport in the first place. The car has enabled widely-scattered space-extensive patterns of activity, the great majority of which cannot now be realistically met by public transport. Thus, the scope of public transport for meeting future travel needs has been greatly exaggerated.

Conclusions
This paper suggests that the quality and comprehensivity of the data sources used in the formation of public policy on transport and road safety seriously distorts its objectivity. As a consequence, government continues to fail to meet its responsibility for furthering the public interest in these domains.

The logic of current policy, and the misleading form in which statistics are presented and interpreted, are inexorably taking us down a road fraught with the now obvious risk that it deters people from travelling in ways which clearly match what could be described as ‘the wider public interest’. Its outcome is to discourage them from getting about on foot or cycle – the ecologically and healthy but apparently ‘dangerous’ modes on which many, such as children and others who do not have a car of their own, are heavily dependent. Directly and indirectly, it promotes longer journeys and journeys in ‘crashworthy’ cars. In that way, survival is better assured in the hostile traffic environment that we have allowed to grow up as the ownership and use of cars have spread

A clear ethical dilemma is posed. If we care about our own safety, our own freedom, and are prepared to ignore the wider consequences, we will travel by car if we have the choice to do so. On the other hand, if we care about the safety and freedom of others, particularly children, and about the ecological consequences of our patterns of travel, we will make more of our journeys on foot or bicycle.

References
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