Safety continues to improve on England’s motorways and major A-roads (the Strategic Road Network (SRN)) but National Highways is unlikely to meet an ambitious safety target set by government, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said today (Thursday March 13) in its third annual assessment of safety on the SRN.
Excluding 2020 and 2021, when there was significantly less traffic due to the pandemic, these latest figures show the fewest number of people killed or seriously injured on the strategic road network (motorways and main A-roads) ever recorded, despite traffic increasing by 2.2% between 2022 and 2023.
Safety Improvement Plan
At ORR’s request, National Highways provided the regulator with a plan to improve safety on the network, and the company is on track to complete the actions it outlined by the end of 2025.
However, ORR’s assessment is that National Highways is unlikely to meet its target of halving the number of people killed or seriously injured on the strategic road network by the end of 2025. The regulator has said that National Highways must remain focussed on delivering the remaining actions in its plan to further close the gap to its target.
Impact of the NEAR programme on all lane running smart motorways
This year, widespread road works to support the installation of safe stopping areas on all lane running smart motorways, as part of the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme have limited the data available to ORR for its analysis of smart motorways.
Stopped Vehicle Detection (SVD) technology is one component in National Highways’ system that supports free flowing traffic and road-user safety on smart motorways. This system is designed to ensure that there is no over-reliance on a single feature.
The available data show that, at a national level, SVD continues to meet the performance requirements set by the company, but some individual schemes missed targets, with seven out of 36 metrics below target across 12 tested sites. Despite this, the SVD system continues to deliver safety benefits for road users.
In its report ORR has told National Highways to improve the data it collects on technology outages on all lane running smart motorways, so that the company can better understand the effects of outages on road users.
National Highways has now delivered all the measures set out in the smart motorway evidence stocktake and action plan set by the government in 2020.
“It is a good thing that that safety continues to improve on the strategic road network, and we should recognise the work that National Highways has been doing to improve safety on its roads,” says Feras Alshaker, director, Performance and Planning for the ORR. “National Highways must now focus on implementing the remaining actions from its plan to further improve road user safety.”
