Stop trying to cut road deaths

Today the Government is announcing a review of the points system for speeding. Also being considered are measures to reduce drink-driving and drug-driving and, of course, the use of speed cameras is rarely out of the news.

These may all be good things, but there is a problem - a trap that all the political parties fall into. The trap is to measure success by the number of deaths and injuries on the roads: the lower the number, the better we're doing. When it goes down, everyone cheers and says "but we need to do even better". When it goes up and everyone expresses concern.

It's an example of our old friend, the inappropriate target. We're all familiar with targets having undesired effects in schools, hospitals and police forces where working to the target becomes more important than delivering a good service. The same is true in road safety.

The most vulnerable road users are pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. One way to cut deaths on the roads would be to make the roads safer for everyone, but that's not what's happened. What we've actually done is made the roads safer for car drivers and more dangerous for everyone else. The result is pedestrians and cyclists scared off the roads and, without them there, the number of deaths falls.

But surely that's not what we want. We don't want our roads in towns and villages to be the sole preserve of motor vehicles. We don't want parents scared to let their children out of the house alone. We don't want elderly people trapped in their homes. That's what destroys communities, kills local shopping centres and leads to all sorts of social and health problems cropping up.

It's strange, but the evidence seems to support it: by making cars safer for their occupants (who then drive more recklessly because they can) and being fixated on separating our different forms of traffic, we do more harm than good.

The answer? End this fixation on the raw number of people killed and injured on the roads. Instead, look at the sort of environment we want to live in, the freedoms we want people to have in and out of their cars, the towns and villages we want our children to grow up in.

If we really want to, we can cut road deaths much lower. Ban cycling, ban unaccompanied minors from being outside the home and encourage everyone to drive or take the bus everywhere instead of walking. Is that what we want?