In Great Britain in 2002 over 300,000 people were killed or injured in over 220,000 road traffic accidents, with the majority occurring on roads where the speed limit was at most 40 mph (Department for Transport, 2003). In London, there were over 41,000 casualties with more than 5,500 involving fatal or serious injuries (Transport for London, 2003). Road traffic law is one of the main tools available to society to reduce the number and severity of road accidents. Traffic laws attempt to improve driving standards by defining as illegal those types of behaviour which are held to be unduly risky, such as drink-driving or driving too fast. Research conducted over the last decade or so has established the strength of the links between such risky driving behaviour and accident liability (e.g. Finch et al., 1994; Taylor et al., 2000; Parker et al., 1995). These laws are only effective if they are obeyed, but drivers frequently violate traffic laws without being caught. The likelihood of an offender being caught depends on the level of enforcement of these laws by human policing and increasingly by automatic equipment such as speed cameras. The level of human policing is influenced by many factors, including the overall number of officers available and the demands on police time for non-traffic duties. There have been press reports that the number of officers being employed on traffic duties in Great Britain has fallen over recent years, with several Police Forces disbanding their specialist traffic police units. At the same time there has been anecdotal evidence that standards of driving behaviour have tended to fall. Falling driving standards might be linked to a fall in the level of enforcement, since the perception that the risk of being caught had fallen could lead some drivers to be more willing to violate traffic laws. Recent developments in France have provided powerful evidence of the potential effectiveness of increased enforcement in reducing accidents and casualties. No scientific assessment of this evidence has so far been completed because of the very short timescale, but this account has been compiled from official statistics and advice from French colleagues. Following a widely publicised motorway accident in late 2002, President Chirac ordered a major increase in enforcement of existing traffic laws together with a range of other measures that would take longer to implement. The number of people killed on French roads in January 2003 was 33% less than in January 2002, and the number of casualties fell by 30%. Provisional estimates of the 2003 totals are 22% and 18% less than the 2002 totals respectively. National reductions on such a scale are virtually unprecedented, and greater enforcement of existing laws (or, at the least, a perception among French drivers that enforcement had increased) is likely to have been the principal cause. This report presents the results of a review of the relevant technical literature that was undertaken by TRL on behalf of Transport for London (TIL) to investigate "How methods and levels of Policing affect road casualty rates". (Author/publisher)
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