To quote Brake, the road safety charity : “More than half of fatal crashes in Britain occur on rural roads. Per mile travelled, rural roads are the most dangerous roads for all kinds of road user”
The UK Government identified rural roads as a road safety priority in its 2019 Road Safety Statement.
Rural roads are the responsibility of local authorities. However, the typical behaviour of many local authorities is :
- To dismiss road safety concerns raised by the public on the basis of lack of objective data ” … yes, yes, everyone always says that the road is dangerous, but there haven’t been any reported incidents”
- To refuse requests to collect objective data (by deploying Traffic Count equipment) due to lack of KSI (Kill / Serious Injury) statistics.
- To respond to KSI incidents by deploying reactive measures in the location of the KSI, regardless of the risk along the wider local rural road network.
Put bluntly, people have to die or be seriously injured in order to stimulate many local authorities into making changes to improve rural road safety.
Clearly this approach is unacceptable, particularly when the long established methodologies of hazard identification, risk calculation, layers of protection analysis and risk reduction are fully available as best practice.
RuralStats provides objective evidence of road safety risks by performing continuous Traffic Counts and making the data publicly visible in order to enable the public to bring objective evidence of traffic behaviour to local authorities.
RuralStats counters measure traffic numbers, direction and speed and upload the data in real-time to the cloud. The sample pages on this site provide traffic data for a single rural road in the WA11 7 area.