To ask His Majesty's Government how many (1) fatalities, and (2) casualties, occurred per 1,000 miles travelled on (a) smart motorways, (b) traditional motorways, and (c) dual carriageways, in the past five years.
Answered on
26 April 2023
National Highways measures safety performance using key metrics, including, Killed and Serious Injuries (KSI) and Fatal and Weighted Injuries (FWI)) which look at absolute values and rates accounting for traffic flows, as endorsed by the Office of Rail and Road.
The latest safety data is available in the Smart motorway stocktake second year progress report published in May 2022 (covering the period 2016-2020). This data shows that, overall, in terms of serious or fatal casualties, smart motorways are our safest roads.
Table I: 5-year average (2016-2020) injury adjusted metrics per Hundred Million Vehicle Miles (HMVM) for all collisions.
Type of motorway/ road | KSI (per HMVM) | FWI (per HMVM) |
Conventional | 1.45 | 0.37 |
ALR | 1.38 | 0.33 |
DHS | 1.17 | 0.32 |
Controlled | 1.30 | 0.32 |
A-roads (on SRN) | 3.66 | 0.91 |