The Road Safety programme contains schemes designed to reduce the number and severity of casualties on Oxfordshire’s roads.

Our approach consists of three areas of work:

• ENGINEERING - physical changes to roads to make them safer
• ENFORCEMENT - working with the police to ensure people stick to speed limits and other traffic laws
• EDUCATION - training or promotion to help people use roads as safely as possible.

We will use engineering solutions in places where changes to the road design or layout will improve safety. Sometimes this will involve measures to reduce vehicle speeds; in other cases we’ll make changes to the layout of junctions or lengths of road.

We’ll continue to work with the Police to ensure that roads have the most suitable speed limit and that these are properly enforced, particularly in places where accidents are caused by speeding.

Our education and publicity work is a crucial part of what we do, and we’ll continue to develop new initiatives targeted at particular groups of people who are more likely to be involved in road accidents, such as younger drivers.

In addition to the work we do as part of our road safety programme, many of the schemes in other programmes also address accident problems. In particular, the Network Development, Towns and Oxford programmes contain schemes which will help to address major road safety problems at the same time as tackling other issues such as congestion, air pollution and unattractive street environments. The Abingdon Town Centre and Headington roundabout improvements are good examples of such schemes.