A justified outcry to a horrific tragedy

Over the past few days Brake has been speaking out about motorway safety following Friday’s horrendous M5 crash, which claimed seven lives and injured many more.

The magnitude of this horrific event – thankfully unprecedented in recent years – meant it made the front page of every newspaper, was subject to a parliamentary debate, and sent out shock-waves not only through local communities, but at national level. However, while the scale of this tragedy was exceptional, sadly the suffering inflicted on the bereaved and injured victims was not.

Britain’s roads are among the safest in the world, and you are least likely to crash on our motorways than on any other type of road. But while we can make these favourable comparisons, it remains that there are 18 deaths and serious injuries every week on Britain’s motorways, each one devastating for the families involved, and each one in violent, man-made and preventable circumstances.

Brake offers desperately needed support to those bereaved and injured in these crashes, as we do to those affected by the M5 crash. We therefore understand that each one of these casualties constitutes a terrible catastrophe. It is crucial that we remember the’forgotten victims’, who suffer equally to those affected by the M5 crash, but whose suffering doesn’t make national headlines, and whose numbers are added to week by week. No doubt if all crashes received as much attention as Friday’s, road safety would receive far greater national priority and investment, rather than being sidelined politically, as it appears to be at present. This crash comes at a time when road safety spending by government has been slashed, dangerously blithe messages about speed are being touted, and national targets for reducing road casualties have been abandoned.

A question Brake has repeatedly been asked following Friday’s crash is ‘how can we learn from this to make our roads safer?’ Clearly, it is too soon for us to draw conclusions about the causes of this crash: the police investigation will take some time. However, this remains an entirely appropriate question, because no matter what the investigation finds, it is crucial that our response to this crash – and indeed all crashes on our roads – is to act to make roads safer, to prevent further needless suffering. That is the humane response, which should of course follow such a horrific event.

But while crash investigations are incredibly important in developing our understanding of how and why these awful events happen, to inform our efforts to make roads safer we already have a large body of academic evidence to draw from. We have a wide range of studies and evaluations from within the UK and overseas on what the main risk factors are on roads, and what’s most effective in preventing crashes and casualties.

It’s particularly pertinent to point out at this point that we already have evidence that raising our motorway speed limit to 80mph – a policy currently being proposed by the government – would result in more crashes, deaths and injuries. This point was made yesterday by Bob Russell MP to the new Transport Secretary Justine Greening at a debate parliament. The response was that we need to let the police get on with their investigation rather than prejudging the causes of the crash.

But the fact is we do not need the results of the investigation into Friday’s crash to tell us that raising the motorway speed limit is bad for road safety – the evidence is already there. But we can use the entirely justified outcry following this crash to spur opposition to this abhorrent and inhumane policy, and to drive action to prevent other families seeing their worst nightmares come true.

Read more:
Brake’s support services for those bereaved and injured in road crashes 
Comment by Peter Wilby, The Guardian, on the M5 crash and rising road deaths
Parliamentary debate on the M5 crash
Brake response to government proposals on raising motorway speed limit