Notwithstanding its laudable aim of cutting roads deaths by a third by 2020, the Department for Transport’s new road safety strategy “A Safer Way: Consultation on Making Britain’s Roads the Safest in the World” has had a lukewarm welcome from the Motor Cycle Industry Association (MCI).
Whilst the MCI applauds the government’s aim of reducing death and injury on Britain’s roads, it claims the consultation has missed an opportunity to make a real difference to motorcycle safety by failing to introduce “positive actions” that would make a real contribution to rider safety.
These, the Association has suggested, could have included “better driver education, increased funding for motorcycle safety programmes such as Bikesafe, wider access to bus lanes and urban infrastructure designed with powered two-wheelers in mind.”
The MCI’s Sheila Rainger said: “We had hoped for a genuinely new vision for road safety which would make a real difference to riders’ safety. Cutting speed limits can never be a panacea when one-third of accidents are caused by the basic driver error of failure to look properly.”
Motorcycle casualties on Britain’s road have remained stable over the past decade, but given the massive rise in the popularity of motorcycling, this actually represents a significant fall in casualty rates.