Collision Prevention & Reduction

Safety is the most important responsibility of anyone involved in transport. It is a global issue: road traffic crashes kill nearly 1.2 million people worldwide every year, and injures millions more. It is the second leading cause of death for people aged 5 to 25 years, with a devastating impact on families and communities.

IHT first published its Accident Reduction & Prevention guidelines in 1986 with an update in 1990. IHT are pleased to continue this tradition of best practice with this Collision Prevention & Reduction (CPR) guideline. The document is a completely new version that provides comprehensive and practical guidelines for policy-makers and practitioners in the field of CPR on our roads. 

There have been radical changes in the nature of local government and its delivery of road safety engineering - including the increased use of externalised bodies and changes in the funding available for road safety projects. The document has been designed for use by local authorities (at all tiers), consultants and road safety auditors.

The purpose behind the original edition of this document was to help embed collision prevention and reduction in a public service setting. For some local authorities that meant making special resources and funding available for the first time; for others it meant adjusting the way they already attempted to stem the tide of human injury on their roads. For everyone it meant looking to the guidelines to see how to deliver this life-saving public service. Those guidelines set the agenda for collision reduction for the ensuing decade and beyond. They were not simply about reporting existing practice.

The new Guidelines have been built around a framework of five elements: data, structure, systems, finance and monitoring. The five elements are shown enveloped within a policy sphere; not another element, but a cultural atmosphere, a set of environmental parameters, without which none of the five elements would be able to function properly, and without which they would not be useful as a framework to bring about improved road safety for our communities.

The thrust of these Guidelines is to show that these five elements are interlinked, that each of the five is needed in order to optimise road safety service delivery and that a sound, sustaining policy environment is needed to establish the five elements and keep them operating well. This last point is vital: casualty reduction on public roads is always going to be a war of attrition; any letup will only mean one thing: more unnecessary death and injury affecting members of our communities on our roads. This makes having a sound policy environment, from the strategic level down to the level of local service delivery teams, of vital importance. Unsupported policy means broken promises, and in the sphere of road safety, broken promises mean broken lives.

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