Dear Will,
It’s taken 16 years, but the UK government has finally listened. They’ve just published a long-awaited Road Safety Strategy to save lives on our roads.
It contains lots of things you’ve helped us campaign for over the years – like targets to reduce deaths and injuries, tougher action on drink driving, and mandating new vehicle safety features. A huge thank you for getting us this far.
But there is one thing that’s missing. There’s no plan for Highway Code promotion – even though the majority of people still aren’t aware of the changes from 2022.
This month marks four years since the changes. Will you ask your MP to press the government to finally communicate the new rules properly to the public?
Before 2010, the government had ambitious targets to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads, and they fell substantially. But they scrapped the targets and progress stalled. While other nations improved their road safety records, the number of tragedies here barely changed.
We’ve been telling the Government for 16 years that scrapping those targets was ridiculous, so we’re delighted that the Road Safety Strategy published yesterday – the first strategy in 10 years – includes an aim to reduce casualties by 65% by 2035.
Setting a target doesn’t make things happen automatically, but it does raise road safety up the political agenda - so thank you. It’s our members and supporters who’ve enabled us to carry on campaigning for safer roads.
There are many other positives in the new strategy which we’ve long campaigned for, including creating a new Road Safety Board to oversee delivery of this strategy – which will include representatives form active travel groups.
We’ll continue to press the government on the things that are missing. One of those is better promotion of the Highway Code changes introduced four years ago.
Those changes were made possible through our members’ support for our Highway Code campaign, but not enough people know about the hierarchy of road users or minimum overtaking distances when passing a cyclist.
You can change that, by pressing the government to commit to a bigger and better public awareness campaign to make our roads safer for everyone.
