Road safety still in the slow lane

Nick Ross (My ambition to kill 4,000, August 25) is right to excoriate the government's pathetically limited attempts to reduce speeding. But the decline in overall casualty numbers referred to were often due to negative factors, such as a decline in walking journeys; or factors such as improved emergency medical care, which have nothing to do with better road behaviour.
Worse still, the massive transformation of vehicles (seat belts, roll bars etc) and roads (crash barriers, anti-skid surfaces etc) has reduced the need for motorists to be careful. No wonder the necessary measures are so difficult for so many well-cocooned drivers to accept. It is precisely the approach of those such as Nick Ross, who praise "road safety" measures "with very little noticeable restraint on motorists' freedoms", that has at least some responsibility for a culture where endangering others is so acceptable.

For those obsessed with number-crunching, the deaths associated with a car-based transport system are predominantly those from health problems stemming from lack of exercise, noxious and greenhouse gas emissions. But then the real question is moral and not numerical.

Robert Davis
Road Danger Reduction Forum