The Mixed Priority Routes Road Safety Demonstration Project (MPR) follows a long history of government led safety demonstration projects, with the aim of helping local authorities tackle road safety problems in new ways. This is one of a series of documents that provides information on the process and outcomes of MPR that are intended to disseminate the success of the project and encourage highway authorities to consider the approach when dealing with complex urban streets that fulfil a number of different functions: movement; access; commercial; and residential. They are typically local high streets and accommodate through traffic, parking, loading and unloading, public transport, walking and cycling. This report briefly summarises the delivery of the project from original inception, through to delivery and assessment of the individual schemes. The project was launched in 2001 with a first group of five local authorities commencing work on their respective schemes whilst the second group began work one year later in 2002. The Mixed Priority Routes project identified a wide variety of issues arising from the project development and management aspects of the scheme through feedback from the authorities. It is generally the view of all of the authorities that the MPR schemes would not have been delivered without the funding provided by the UK Department for Transport. MPR schemes place very significant and diverse requirements on project teams. In most cases continuity was maintained but, where staff changed the loss of knowledge was evident. Early support from local representatives was crucial in obtaining continuing support. Care must be taken when schemes spanned election periods as unpicking agreements and compromises can be extremely counter-productive in terms of public confidence in the scheme. These schemes need to be developed using a first principles approach, i.e. the scheme should be developed on the basis of a sound and detailed knowledge of how the local area operated and should be designed to those needs rather than by rigorous adherence to local authority design standards. The wide range of measures introduced across the different authorities is described. All of the projects have delivered, to a greater or lesser degree, casualty reductions in their areas. Reductions have ranged from 24% to 60% but with particular benefit to vulnerable road users. Further to the safety related benefits, there has been a marked improvement in many other key indicators identified in monitoring exercises aimed at assessing the qualitative impact of the schemes such as economic and environmental factors. For the full text of this document see http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/dpp/mpr/summaryscheme.pdf (Author/publisher)
Abstract