Introduction

This report highlights the road casualty and collision data for the Torbay area during the calendar year 2021

Torbay Council’s proposals for improving road safety for the next year are identified in the Torbay Council Road Safety Strategy 2017 - 2020, however, this report highlights in more detail the activities for 2021.

It should be noted that:

  • There were 2 fatalities on Torbay roads in 2021, one of which was an 11 year-old pedestrian.
  • In 2021 there was an increase in the number of killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties, showing an increase in number from last year, rising from 34 to 51.
  • After a decrease in child killed and seriously injured casualties in both 2019 and 2020, the results for 2021 show that there has been an increase from 1 to 5.

Analysis shows that all of the casualties were pedestrians, ranging in age from 10 to 15.

  • The results also show slight injury casualties, after falling dramatically by 24% in 2020, returned to previous levels, recording an increase to 244.

It should be noted that during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the closure of schools and the introduction of both homeschooling and homeworking noticeably reduced the number of vehicles using the network. Therefore, as schools and businesses reopened traffic levels began to rise, as have casualty numbers.

Two young cyclists (aged 12 and 14) were slightly injured in 2021, along with a 15-year-old on an e-scooter.

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Torbay's targets

In March 2000 the Government announced new targets for reducing casualties nationally.  The targets are the percentage reductions to be achieved by 2010 compared with the average results for the base years, 1994 to 1998.  The targets set by the Government were as follows:

  • 40% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured in road crashes/collisions;
  • 50% reduction in the number of children killed or seriously injured;
  • 10% reduction in the slight casualty rate, expressed as the number of people slightly injured.

The development of a local road safety strategy is included within the new Local Transport Plan 3 (2011 to 2026), to ensure greater reductions in road casualties locally by:

  • Encouraging better and co-ordinated working between local authorities and their partners;
  • Enabling local authorities to consider their future priorities;
  • Involving and informing the public.

Road Safety is of paramount importance to both the Council and the residents it serves. Road safety issues are wide-ranging and sometimes complex, but the Council has a good record of improving road safety for all transport users. A mixture of online education, encouragement, enforcement and engineering alongside evaluation will be used to further improve the safety of all road users. The targeting of young drivers will continue via the ‘Learn 2 Live’ programme.

An evidence-based approach to road safety engineering is used in Torbay to identify and target investment where it is most needed and proposals for our new strategy are being prepared to ensure that it integrates fully with the South West Penisula Road Safety Partnership Casualty Reduction Strategy 2020 to 2030, as adopted by Vision Zero South West (VZSW).

Unlike in the period up to 2010, the Department for Transport (DfT) has not set any targets for us to compare our results against.

However the DfT published its Strategic Framework for Road Safety (May 2011) which is designed to help Government, local organisations and citizens to monitor the progress in improving road safety.

The DfT have identified 6 key indicators which relate to road deaths and will measure the key outcomes of the strategy at the national level. These are:

  • Number of road deaths (and rate per billion vehicle miles)
  • Rate of motorcyclist deaths per billion vehicle miles
  • Rate of car occupant deaths per billion vehicle miles
  • Rate of pedal cyclist deaths per billion vehicle miles
  • Rate of pedestrian deaths per billion miles walked
  • Number of deaths resulting from collisions involving drivers under 25.

At a local level, such as here in Torbay, the number of road deaths is small and subject to fluctuation. For this reason, the DfT propose the following as key indicators:

  • Number of killed or seriously injured casualties
  • Rate of killed or seriously injured casualties per million people
  • Rate of killed or seriously injured casualties per billion vehicle miles

The progress will be reported annually, with details published in ‘Reported Road Casualties Great Britain’.

This will enable local authorities to consider their future priorities, whilst involving and informing the public of what action is taken.

At a local level here in Torbay, we will also continue to report casualty figures each year as part of the Road Casualty Reduction Report and the figures for the following categories can be found displayed in section 3 of this report.

  • Fatal
  • Killed and seriously injured
  • Killed and seriously injured (0 to 15 years old)
  • Slightly injured
  • Slightly injured (0 to 15 years old)

In Torbay’s Road Safety Strategy 2012 to 2020, six key areas were identified as priorities for Torbay.

  • Pedestrian casualties
  • Increased education for learners and young drivers
  • Motorcycle casualties in particular young scooter riders and riders on larger sports bikes.
  • Careless or dangerous road user behaviour
  • Illegal and inappropriate use of speed.

Driving behaviour continues to be the main cause of road collisions and traditional engineering solutions will become more difficult to identify, more expensive and less effective in reducing casualties.

Targets

Over the 10 year period (2010 to 2020) Torbay Council intended to make reductions of:

  • 25% to all KSI casualties
  • 33% to collision casualties which are fatal, permanently disabled as a result, or where major medical care is required to prevent permanent disability or death.
  • 10% to collisions resulting in Slight injuries
  • 25% to collisions involving pedestrians
  • 25% to casualties resulting from Powered Two Wheelers (PTW). The figures will take into account changes to levels of ownership of LA Registered PTW.
  • 25% to all casualties resulting from collisions involving drivers/riders aged 17 to 24.

Using a 2012 baseline average of 2006 to 2010.

Over the coming years Torbay, in line with our partners in Vision Zero South West (VZSW), will move towards the Safe Systems approach to road safety with a target of providing a safe transport system, free from death and serious injury.

What is Vision Zero South West?

Vision Zero is a shared commitment between a number of organisations across Devon and Cornwall, who all share a commitment to cut the number of deaths and serious injuries in the region to zero.

Vision Zero is led by a partnership board which includes a wide range of experts from all around the South West including senior police and fire officers, leading clinicians, councillors and the police and crime commissioner for Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Vision Zero’s partners include:

  • Cornwall Council
  • Devon County Council
  • Plymouth City Council
  • Torbay Council
  • Exeter City Council
  • Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service
  • Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service
  • Devon and Cornwall Police
  • Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly
  • National Highways
  • NHS University Hospitals Plymouth Trust
  • Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust
  • South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust
  • Cornwall Air Ambulance
  • Devon Air Ambulance
  • Driving for Better Business
  • Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS)

Safe Systems involves an important shift in approach from trying to prevent all collisions to preventing death and mitigating serious injury in road traffic collisions,

Safe System requires a proactive approach placing road safety in the mainstream of road traffic system planning, design and operation and use. Safe System interventions address common human errors (including seat belt use, alcohol and drug abuse) and human tolerance to injury thresholds and in so doing aims to address the road safety needs of non-motorised as well as motorised road users, younger and older users, male and female users.

Safe System has five pillars of action:

  1. Safe Road Use;
  2. Safe vehicles;
  3. Safe speeds;
  4. Safe roads and roadsides;
  5. Post-crash response.

This will back up the more normal strategies of Engineering and Enforcement.

The key demonstrably effective strategies are:

  • Encouraging the use of safer modes and safer routes
  • Safety-conscious planning and proactive safety engineering design
  • Safe separation or safe integration of mixed road use
  • Managing speeds to crash protection levels
  • Providing crash-protective roadsides
  • Providing vehicles with collision avoidance and collision injury mitigation and protection
  • Deterring dangerous behaviour and ensuring compliance with key safety rules by social marketing and increased highly visible police enforcement and use of camera technologies and by providing proven driver assistance safety technologies in motor vehicles to help drivers keep to speed limits, wear seat belts, and avoid excess alcohol.
  • Managing risk via driver standards e.g. graduated driver licensing.
  • Fast and efficient emergency medical help, diagnosis and care.

Vision Zero South West has a long-term goal for a road traffic system which is eventually free from death and serious injury. It involves an important paradigm shift from trying to prevent all collisions to preventing death and mitigating serious injury in road traffic collisions, a problem which is largely preventable based on current knowledge. It is backed up by interim quantitative targets to reduce the numbers of deaths and serious injuries usually over a 10-year period. In Safe System, there is also a focus on targeting intermediate outcomes that are causally related to death and serious injury e.g. average speeds, seat belt use, sober driving, the safety quality of roads and vehicles and emergency medical system response.

Safe System is a shared responsibility between government agencies at different levels and a range of multi-sectoral agencies and stakeholders (road managers, vehicle manufacturers, emergency medical system providers, safety rule compliance managers, employers, and road users) to take appropriate actions to ensure that road collisions do not lead to serious or fatal injuries. Given this complex multi-agency and multi-sectoral context, it requires careful leadership by the government and top management of organisations.

Safe System strategy implementation requires strengthened institutional delivery and identified good practices for all these functions. A road safety management capacity review is recommended as an initial first step to provide a framework for all key agencies to assess the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches and to identify the next steps.

With this in mind, all authorities currently involved with VZSW have undertaken a Strategic Needs Assessment, in order to summarise the key road safety challenges facing the peninsula and to frame these challenges in a Safe Systems and public health context.

Following discussions between partners, at both strategic and operational levels, we have formalised how VZSW will look and operate in the future.

This has split operations into Activity A and Activity B, which are described below:

  • Activity A - Police Led (Monitoring and Enforcement)
  • Activity B -Local Authority Led (Education, Training, Themes and Publicity)

The South West Peninsula Road Safety Partnership Casualty Reduction Strategy 2020-2030 confirms that the high-risk road user groups in Torbay are:

  • 16 to 24 year old drivers
  • Motorcyclists
  • 17 to 24 year old motorcycle riders
  • Speed

More widely across the South West other high-risk road user groups include.

  • Older drivers 60+
  • Pedal cyclists
  • Pedestrians
  • Business drivers

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Casualty and collision data

A Casualty is a person killed or injured in a reported collision on a public road. Casualties are subdivided into killed, seriously injured and slightly injured. The graphs below outline the road casualty and collision data for the years 2010 to 2021 compared against the government targets (where applicable).

It has long been known that non-fatal (and particularly slight) casualties are underreported to the police and therefore this figure is likely to be an underestimate of the total.

The introduction of online self-reporting by the Metropolitan Police Service at the end of 2016 and a few other forces in 2018, is likely to have led to an increase in the number of non-fatal (and particularly slight) casualties reported in these forces and therefore impact the total for Great Britain.

Approximately half of the English police forces adopted the CRASH (Collision Recording and Sharing) system for recording reported road traffic collisions at the end of 2015 or the first part of 2016, Devon and Cornwall Police switched in December 2015.

It is likely that the recording of injury severity is more accurate for forces using this new reporting system. Nationally this has had a large impact on the number of serious injuries recorded in 2016, compared with 2015. Some of these serious injuries may previously have been classified as slight injuries, which means that the 2016 and 2017 serious injury figures are not comparable to previous years.

CRASH is an injury-based severity reporting system where the officer records the most severe injury for the casualty and the injuries are then automatically converted to a severity level from ‘slight’ to ‘serious’. Eliminating the uncertainty in determining severity that arises from the officer having to make their own judgement means that the new severity level data observed from these systems using injury-based methods are expected to be more accurate than the data from other systems.

Therefore there has been a large increase in the number of serious injuries reported by the police after the introduction of CRASH in 2015/16 (+20%); as around half of police forces in England adopted this system, however, the number of serious injuries recorded in 2017 has remained stable when compared to 2016.

Even though Torbay has such low base figures, it should be noted that this still showed an increase in our KSI figures of 15% between 2015 and 2016.

Fatalities

There were two fatalities on Torbay roads in 2021, an increase of two from the previous year’s zero.

The first of which took place on Totnes Road in August, the collision site was located to the west of Blagdon and involved a 64 year-old driver being fatally injured in a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle.

The second took place on Queensway in November and involved an 11 year-old pedestrian being struck and fatally injured by a car, whilst crossing the road.

It should be noted that during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the closure of schools and the introduction of both homeschooling and homeworking noticeably reduced the number of vehicles using the network. Therefore, as schools and businesses reopened traffic levels began to rise, as have casualty numbers.

Killed and Seriously Injured (KSI’s) (all age groups)

In 2021 there was an increase in the number of killed and seriously injured casualties, from 34 to 51, made up of 2 fatal and 49 seriously injured casualties.

Torbay Council continues to work from very low base figures and significant reductions can be very hard to identify, further details on reviewing collision cluster sites are included below.

It should be noted that during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the closure of schools and the introduction of both homeschooling and homeworking noticeably reduced the number of vehicles using the network. Therefore, as schools and businesses reopened traffic levels began to rise, as have casualty numbers.

It should be noted that due to the change in the Police collision recording system (as detailed above) the serious injury figures from 2016 onwards are not comparable to previous years.

Killed and seriously injured (0 – 15 age group)

After a decrease in child killed and seriously injured casualties in both 2019 and 2020, the results for 2021 show that there has been an increase from 1 to 5.

Analysis shows that all of the casualties were pedestrians, ranging in age from 10 to 15.

It should be noted that during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the closure of schools and the introduction of both home schooling and home working noticeably reduced the number of vehicles using the network. Therefore, as schools and businesses reopened traffic levels began to rise, as have casualty numbers.

It should be noted that due to the change in the Police collision recording system (as detailed above) the serious injury figures from 2016 onwards are not comparable to previous years.

Slight injuries

All ages

The results also show slight injury casualties, after falling dramatically by 24% in 2020, returned to previous levels, recording an increase of 30% to 244.

Children (0-15 age group)

Likewise, there has been an increase in child slights, with 20 being recorded in 2021.

Two young cyclists (aged 12 and 14) were slightly injured in 2021, along with a 15 year-old on an e-scooter.

Provisional analysis shows that 45% of these casualties were pedestrians, the youngest of which was nine years old.

It should be noted that during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the closure of schools and the introduction of both homeschooling and homeworking noticeably reduced the number of vehicles using the network. Therefore, as schools and businesses reopened traffic levels began to rise, as have casualty numbers.

This information can be split as follows:

In the 2021 collision figures, there are two groups which have shown a marked increase in number, these being motor vehicles and powered two-wheelers (e.g. motorcyclists), which have increased by 28% and 33% respectively.

In the 2021 casualty figures, there are three groups which have shown a marked increase in number, these being car drivers (+53%), car passengers (+48%) and powered two-wheelers e.g. motorcyclists (+21%).

Further analysis is required to look further into ages and causation factors.

It should be noted that during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the closure of schools and the introduction of both homeschooling and homeworking noticeably reduced the number of vehicles using the network. Therefore, as schools and businesses reopened traffic levels began to rise, as have casualty numbers.

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Planned road safety campaigns 2021/23

Reductions in local government grants from Central Government and the increasing demands on our services meant that difficult decisions had to be made and, as there is no statutory duty to provide Road Safety officers, the Mayor's Budget for 2017/2018 resulted in the loss of posts within Road Safety.

However, whilst there were no local Road Safety campaigns or Road Safety education undertaken during 2021/2022, officers are currently working on a Road Safety Communications and Engagement Plan which will come online early in the new school year.

The campaign will support the delivery of the Community & Corporate Plan, particularly the Thriving People vision and the priority action around building safer communities.

Using Torbay road safety data, it is proposed to develop and implement a road safety campaign that is aimed at everyone in the community doing their bit – Let’s make Torbay’s roads safer together.

The objective of this communications and engagement plan are to:

Inform, engage, and discuss with all road users in Torbay that road safety is everyone’s responsibility.

We will do this by:

  • Running a highly visual campaign across a variety of platforms and media outlets that is targeted at a variety of road users, encouraging them to think about how their own actions and behaviours could contribute to a road traffic casualty.
  • Provide schools with material that will enable them to discuss with pupils the importance of staying alert to road safety at all times.
  • Hosting ‘pop up’ events in Torbay town centres with partner agencies to raise awareness that road safety is everyone’s responsibility.
  • Engaging with and sharing content Road Safety Awareness Week 14 to 20 November. (Theme for 2022 is Road Safety for all).

The website will be reworked, becoming an up-to-date pointing service, guiding users to the latest available Road Safety information.

However, investment in officer resources will be required to bring the webpage up to date.

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Planned expenditure of funding for road safety initiatives

Contained within the Local Transport Plan Implementation Plan (2016/17 to 2020/21) are the details of committed budgets which includes Road Safety initiatives. This information is shown under the heading of Safety/Congestion/Engineering Work.

This budget will allow for a number of small minor road safety engineering schemes each year. Any larger schemes will need to be considered as separate business cases as part of the authority’s capital budget-setting process.

The expenditure for minor schemes in 2022/23 is expected to be £50,000.

Road Safety Initiatives

With the implementation of various road safety schemes since Torbay became a unitary authority, there are now very few obvious ‘traditional’ collision cluster areas which can be identified. This means that the law of diminishing returns applies to any schemes implemented. 

However, engineering measures are an important part of the Council’s strategy for reducing collisions. 

The Council will continue with its Safer Journeys programme and will carry out a review of accidents to identify any linear routes which have a higher-than-normal collision record. 

Further details of the engineering measures to be carried out in 2022/23 will be presented to the Transport Working Party in the Road Safety Initiatives Report.

Vision Zero South West (formerly known as the Peninsula Road Safety Partnership)

Torbay Council continues to work closely with the Police to ensure enforcement is a key activity in road casualty reduction.  The Council also works with the Vision Zero South West partnership (formerly known as the Peninsula Road Safety Partnership) to use camera enforcement and education to reduce speeds and red light violations. 

There will be no revenue funding for the operation of Safety Cameras in 2022/23, however, the operation and enforcement of the fixed safety camera sites within Torbay will continue. The partnership is responsible for the maintenance of the cameras, whilst the authority is responsible for the poles and housings and any work required would be funded from our maintenance budget.

The authority will continue to work closely with the partnership to ensure that mobile safety camera activity is targeted at those locations where speed-related problems continue in an effort to increase the visibility of enforcement. 

An increase in the number of Police Road Casualty Reduction Officers (RCRO) across the VZSW area has been greatly welcomed, as has the relaunch of Community Speed Watch

Through the "Have your say" process (previously known as PACT) local communities told the Police that their biggest priority was reducing the number of speeding motorists and therefore the Speed Watch programme has been relaunched.

Speed Watch involves members of the local community and aims to engage and educate drivers rather than issue fines and court summonses. Using a staged warning system, first-time offenders will receive education and warnings, persistent offenders can expect further police action and even a court appearance. 

Further details are available on the Speed Watch website.

A new addition for 2018 was the Police ‘No Excuses’ team, which has proved to be very effective. With operational hubs at Exeter and Bodmin, the officers are dedicated to targeting offences on the region's roads and assisting and enabling fellow road policing and response officers to do the same.

Concentrating on tackling the Fatal Five offences that cause an unacceptable level of deaths and serious injuries on our roads – excessive or inappropriate speed, not wearing a seatbelt, distracted driving such as using a handheld mobile phone, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs and careless or inconsiderate driving.

They are supported by a researcher to identify significant intelligence trends on road users and areas with specific issues.

Another new addition to the Police portfolio is Devon and Cornwall Police’s Operation Snap, which has been put in place to facilitate submissions of video evidence relating to driving incidents that members of the public have witnessed.

Operation Snap will investigate road traffic offences such as dangerous driving, driving without due care and attention, careless driving, using a mobile phone handheld, not wearing a seat belt, contravening a red traffic light and contravening solid white lines, however, this is not an exhaustive list.

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