New tyres come with at least 7mm of tread. On a new road surface they can stop a car travelling at 60mph in less than 50 metres. But what about a typical car on a typical road? How confident can drivers be that they, and the cars behind, can pull up quickly in an emergency? The risks are many times greater if tread depths are close to the legal limit and the emergency is on a wet, worn-out road surface. The AA Motoring Trust and the County Surveyors’ Society have jointly funded a review of tyres, road surfaces and road accidents. This report summarises and develops the key findings and advice. Surprisingly, it is the first of its type to probe the real-world combination of tyres and the roads that people drive on daily. Every year there are 5 million road traffic accidents in Britain, resulting in about 35,000 fatal or serious injuries. In every crash, and in millions of near misses, how well that small area of rubber and road grip each other can be a matter of life and death. The AA Trust-CSS review shows that, at busy sites where road surfaces are subjected to excessive wear (about 10 per cent of the network) and fall below thresholds set by first-level safety checks (‘investigatory levels’), the number of skidding accidents in the wet increases by almost 50 per cent. About one mile in six of the principal road network currently falls below these thresholds. To make matters worse, 10 per cent of British motorists drive with at least one tyre that has so little tread left on it that it is illegal. Motorists must not shirk their basic responsibility to maintain their cars to required standards. But it is vital that road authorities also fulfil their responsibilities. They need to have, and to use, sufficient funds and to adopt the right procedures to provide high-quality road surfaces. Our report reveals the potential of new road surfacing techniques and new tyre technology. It also contains sensible advice for motorists, tyre suppliers, garages, trading standards officers and road authorities. In the short term Local councils must understand and carry out their legal responsibilities to maintain roads: few other budgets have such an influence on life and death in their communities Owners and operators of garages and filling stations must ensure that air equipment is working and properly calibrated and trading standards officers should check this Motorists must check their tyres’ air pressure weekly, and accept that the legal limit of 1.6mm tread depth is the point at which tyres are so bad that they break the law and put themselves and other road-users at greater risk In the medium term, we must all start to take accidents that happen on the roads and result in death or severe injury as seriously as accidents that happen in the air, on the railways and in the workplace. There is a need to establish computerised records of the road surface condition as well as tyre type and condition in every fatal crash; and to ensure that best practice becomes universal for recording all maintenance carried out on roads The government should lead a review of the 1.6mm tread depth limit in the light of research evidence from real crashes. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting