A road safety strategy should be about reducing road casuaties? Not according to some!

Cullingworth will soon be further adorned by Vehicle Activated Signs (VAS) telling us to slow down as we enter the village - initially from Bingley & Keighley. Leaving aside that one of these signs - at Cow House - is in perhaps the daftest location one could imagine (plonking something that intermittently flashes on and off just six feet from someones bedroom window is not really appropriate), I have been thinking about the way in which we approach road safety. And crucially whether, in responding to the calls from local people, we spend money in places where there are few if any injury accidents.

Steve Thornton, Chair of the West Yorkshire Safer Roads Partnership recently criticised the Government's proposed approach to road safety as concentrating too much on reducing road injuries. Now far be it for me to criticise Mr Thornton - who is after all an expert - but isn't a road safety strategy absolutely about reducing road injuries? There is no "wider context" - the object is to reduce the death and injury toll on our roads and anything else is just cant.


And (no surprises here) the West Yorkshire Safer Roads Partnership is one of those obscure, unaccountable bodies which doesn't meet in public, doesn't say when it meets and doesn't publish any minutes, budgets or other operational information. Yet its "Chair" - an unelected official - gets a very public platform to criticise the very sensible suggestion that road safety is about...er?...safety on the roads!