Safety first

The Local Authority Road Safety Officers Association (LARSOA) is the national road safety organisation representing Road Safety Officers (RSOs) employed in local government across the UK

Representing around 185 of the 200 eligible local authorities across the UK, LARSOA assists RSOs to fulfill their statutory role to reduce the number and severity of road casualties through education, training and publicity programmes.
    
Ensuring we are both data led and focus on programmes to our key target audiences will help us to meet the government casualty reduction targets for 2010 and beyond.
    
Each week, LARSOA publishes a round-up of road safety news from across the UK on its website www.larsoa.org.uk, which predominantly reflects good practice from road safety professionals. Whilst we recognise that it is good to share and learn from good practice, it is equally important to find out from colleagues about things that haven’t worked so well, to save time on ever-increasingly limited resources within local government. Sometimes, being advised by colleagues about projects that haven’t worked so well can help us to focus on work that will benefit us in reducing the level of death and injury on the roads throughout the UK.
    
LARSOA also aims to influence national debate – government policy and action together with public opinion. The association works to achieve national recognition for road safety issues, commissions research into behaviour which contributes to road collisions and develops national road safety campaigns in the media.

Drink driving
Some of our key campaign areas include drinking and driving, raising awareness to the issue of alcohol impairment after just one drink and encouraging drivers that if they are drinking then they should leave the car behind. We are also keen to raise awareness to the issues associated with driving the morning after drinking and the potential for still being over the drink/drive limit.
    
The numbers of people killed on the UK roads due to alcohol impairment has now levelled off and a hardcore number of drivers appear to be putting the safety of other road users at risk because of their selfish and arrogant disregard to thinking they are fit to drive after they have been drinking.
    
Whilst we are aware of the pitfalls of introducing a zero drink drive limit, we are calling on the government to consider a reduction in the drink drive limit to 50mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, which would send out a clear message to encourage drivers not to take the risk and get behind the wheel if they have had a drink.
    
There are similar issues of impairment surrounding taking drugs, either prescribed or recreational, and driving and LARSOA is encouraged by the governments recent consultation to try and tackle these issues.

In the dark
Another significant campaign issue for LARSOA is related to daylight savings and, together with other major road safety players, such as The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and The Parliamentary Council for Transport Safety (PACTS), we are calling for a 3-year trial of Double British Summertime. Research by RoSPA suggests that this could save over 100 lives a year and a further 450 serious injuries.
    
The idea would be to be in line with the Central European Timezone and essentially give us lighter evenings all year round by the better use of the daylight. Whilst collisions and casualties peak during both the morning and evening rush hour, there’s currently the combination during the winter months of both road user tiredness and the potential lack of visibility during the journey on the way home from work and school. In addition to the casualty savings, there is also a compelling argument to save resources for additional lighting and this would have a positive effect on our carbon footprint.
    
The reason that a 3-year trial is called for on this issue is that it would give a better picture statistically to see if there was a trend for casualty savings, whereas conducting a trial for just a 1-year period may be statistically flawed by random fluctuation.
    
At Work Road Safety, further to recent changes in the Corporate Manslaughter Act, is a major current issue and was on the agenda at LARSOAs National Conference in November 2008. Local Authority Road Safety Teams are keen to promote this issue within the business community in addition to getting their own organisations on track with the responsibility for employees who drive either as part of their job, or indeed just to and from the office on a daily basis.
    
LARSOA is keen to work with business partners to get across mutually beneficial road safety campaigns that can have an impact on road user behaviour and casualty reduction. In recent years we have worked with national organisations to get across messages with regard to driver tiredness and promoting the issue of being safe, being seen and child safety. We also support the many Department for Transport campaigns that are built upon research with the target audience to effectively get across the road safety message to ‘at risk’ groups of road users.
    
In-car safety, in particular wearing of seatbelts and the use of appropriate restraints for young passengers are areas of work we are also keen to support.
    
With regard to vehicle safety and the recent leaps by manufacturers to improve their vehicles in terms of occupant safety and market their vehicles in accordance with their Euro NCAP status is having a positive impact upon survival rates of passengers within vehicles and reducing the severity of injury of those involved in collisions.
    
It’s difficult to recommend one vehicle over another in terms of overall safety, but a visit to http://www.euroncap.com/home.aspx helps drivers to select a vehicle based on a clear safety rating system. In particular, special mention should be made to Renault for being the first to deliver a whole fleet of vehicles to meet the 5 star occupant safety rating.
    
The next step for manufacturers is to deliver vehicles to the market that offer similar levels of protection to pedestrians and cyclists, as our most vulnerable road users.