Too many people are killed, injured and disabled on the roads of Great Britain. Too many of these are children. The communities with least advantages suffer most. More than a quarter of child pedestrian casualties happen in the most deprived 10% of wards. Most deaths, injuries and disabilities on our roads, and their associated trauma for relatives and friends, are avoidable. They are usually caused by someone’s bad driving. That is why the Government has set targets which, by 2010, would reduce by 40% the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads, and the number of children killed or seriously injured, by 50%. The number of people killed or seriously injured in 2003 was 22% below the baseline average for 1994-98; and the number of children killed or seriously injured was 40% below. This is good progress. But 35,000 people are still killed or injured a year on our roads and there is a particular concern that the number of people killed in road accidents is not going down in the same way as the less serious injuries and has levelled out at nearly 10 a day, and indeed was slightly up in 2003 (3,508) compared to the previous year. So whilst significant advances have been made, it is clear that road safety and further reductions in the numbers of accidents, injuries and deaths must remain a high priority. A strategy for road safety needs to cover education (training of drivers, public awareness of risks); engineering (vehicle and road design, use of signs, warnings); and enforcement (penalties for breach of standards, investigation and detection of those breaches). Performance in these areas needs to be evaluated continuously. This paper is primarily about aspects of enforcement. It is about ways in which the criminal law can reinforce standards of good driving by penalizing bad driving, especially when it results in death or injury. Ever since motor vehicles grew in numbers and importance, the criminal law has been used to set and enforce minimum standards of good driving. The harm that can be caused by bad driving is so great that people have expected the State to use its powers to penalize breaches of good behaviour through criminal sanctions. At the same time huge strides have been made in improving safety through engineering and technical design, and the education and training of drivers has improved beyond recognition. No qualified driver has any excuse or reason for not knowing how to drive well. The right to drive is a privilege, earned by proving competence in safe driving, and withdrawable on proof of incompetence and dangerousness. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting