Road Safety Plan - What is the Problem?

• Killed & Seriously injured Casualties
• Child Casualties
• Slight Casualties
• Targets

Between 1999 and 2004, more than 90% of all the injury accidents in Aberdeenshire involved human error as one of the main causes.

Killed & Seriously injured Casualties

More than 1/3 of all injury accidents have involved excessive or inappropriate speed. We all have a personal responsibility for reducing accidents on our roads. The previous Road Safety Plan identified Education as being a key strand in the effort to reduce casualties on our roads and the figures above support this approach.

Child Casualties

While the general figures and statistics shown later in this document are encouraging, it is perhaps disappointing that the proportion of speed-related accidents has remained the same.

This is in spite of the formation of NESCAMP – the North East Safety Camera Partnership, in which Aberdeenshire Council is the Lead Partner. The life of the last Plan saw several new initiatives taking off, the largest of which was the introduction of this safety camera partnership with Moray Council, Aberdeen City Council, the Scottish Executive, Grampian Police and the District Courts.

Aberdeenshire Council were also lead players in the SCOTS (Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland) experiment on part-time speed limits at schools. This led directly to the authorisation of the new part-time speed limit signing and was immediately followed by the Scottish Executive providing additional funding to all local authorities to establish 20mph speed limits outside every school in Scotland.

Slight Casualties

Aberdeenshire Council is committed to looking for new ideas and initiatives in Road Safety that can be used in Aberdeenshire. The CONCEPT Project (Co-operation Of Networksfor the Creation of Effective Policies for Transport) has proved to be an excellent forum for this. Aberdeenshire are lead partners in this European project which shares good practice amongst the partner organisations.

Targets

Aberdeenshire’s Casualty Reduction targets are:

1. 40% reduction in killed or seriously injured (KSI)casualties
2. 50% reduction in child casualties
3. 10% reduction in slight casualties

Our progress towards achieving these targets is shown in the charts above. All targets are based on casualty numbers and are measured against the five-year average 1994 -1998. Target 1 is the same as the UK National target while Targets 2 and 3 are more ambitious than the UK National targets. The charts demonstrate that we are making steady progress towards Target 1, good progress towards Target 2 and that we have already achieved Target 3. This is especially pleasing since it is better than the national progress on reducing slight casualties.

While the general trends are downwards, there are always “blips” where numbers can increase and we will endeavour to reduce that phenomenon as much as possible and keep casualty numbers going downwards.