Road Construction and Road Safety The memorandum on the lay-out
of roads issued by the Minister of Transport on Tuesday calls for nothing but praise. Mr. Hore-Belisha shows himself fully conscious of the fact that the main factor in road-safety is road-construc- tion, and in nothing are his recommendations more sound than in their insistence on the importance of non-skid sur- faces. That, combined with the divided up and down tracks, the provision of cycle-tracks, the rounding of curves so as to give the maximum of visibility ahead, and the provision of occasional bridges or subways will go far to reduce the appalling total of accidents, so far as the cost of new construction can be kept within reasonable financial limits. Safety, in short, can to a large extent, be achieved if we are willing to pay for it. Some control must obviously be kept over expenditure, but before such a total as that of the 14,602 accidents (involving 521 fatalities) for January, reported on Wednesday, parsimony stands revealed as little less than criminal. The figures show an increase in both fatal and non-fatal accidents over those for January, 1936, and it is to be noted that over three times as many took place on speed-limit as on non-speed-limit roads.
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