Performance Monitoring - Do We Deliver?

The County Council has 7 Corporate Objectives and 3 of these are are especially relevant for Safety Engineering Group:-

• Feel safe
• Lead healthy lives
• Travel easily and safely

The Local Picture

It's no use obtaining accident data, identifying accident sites and designing and implementing schemes if those schemes don't reduce accidents. We record all our schemes and measure the number of accidents in the 3 years before the scheme went in and compare it to accidents in the 3 years after.

688 Schemes	Accidents in 3 yrs Before	Accidents in 3 yrs After	Percentage Change
All Accidents	4932	4062	-17.6
Killed & Seriously Injured (KSI)	1019	736	-27.8
Pedestrian involved	1062	774	-27.1
Pedestrian KSI	366	236	-35.5
Cyclist involved	481	400	-16.8
Cyclist KSI	89	74	-16.9

These 688 schemes cost £13.6m or £19,700 each and saved 870 accidents. Using the Government's figures for accident prevention the value of the accidents saved to the community would be £77,000,000 for the outlay of £13,600,000 - by almost any measure a good investment of the public's money -with a rate of return approaching 190%- and, far more importantly, resulting in the prevention of some quite dreadful accidents and injury to people.

Some examples of the types of measures implemented locally and their effectiveness can be found here>.

The Bigger Picture

Tackling specific sites with poor accident records is clearly the major issue for Safety Engineering, however, for Traffic & Safety Section and the County Council as a whole it is how casualties are changing over time that matters.

 

The Government has set demanding casualty reduction targets for all highway authorities and these have to be met by 2010. The targets, what they mean for Lancashire, and how we are doing are shown below:-

National 2010 Targets*	Base years = 1994/98 averages	2010 targets	Actual 1999	Actual 2000	Actual 2001	Actual 2002	Actual 2003	Actual 2004
40% reduction in all Killed & Serious casualties	1215	729	996	913	956	893	888	886
50% reduction in Child Killed & Serious casualties	204	102	162	139	160	129	122	121
10% reduction in slight casualty rate	5964	5368	5875	5436	5826	5735	5229	5541

Our Best Value Performance Indicators BVPI99:

BVPI99 - 2003/4

BVPI99 - 2004/5

Casualty figures for Lancashire and each of its 12 districts

*These targets are discussed in detail in the Government document:

'Tomorrow's Roads - Safer for Everyone'