Are spending cuts making driving a car more dangerous?

Very concerned. And no amount of technology is a match for some of the poor/dangerous driving you see on the roads. I’m still waiting for the mobile phone that automatically switches itself off when a driver tries to use it or better still texts the nearest police man.

I for one hate all the potholes we still have here there and everywhere causing cyclists to swerve w/o indicating or a car/van/lorry to lose control when they burst a tyre..

I cannot believe how you have phrased this, surely you should be asking how are spending cuts making our roads less safe!

If the councils believe they can cut spending on road safety projects without any effect, then they lied about the campaigns necessity in the first place!

I will rejoice when councils start making cuts in obscene wages for senior staff, out of control expense accounts, pet projects that benefit no one apart from family & cronies, and start using the money squeezed out of us for the purposes we give it to them for.
We have already had our street lights dimmed, many older people cannot now drive at night, as they cannot see the street. In some areas they are actually turning off street lights for part of the night!
Potholes are left to deteriorate further, unless one causes an accident, then the council fill it in ASAP, deny it was ever there in an effort to avoid paying damages.

Conversely there seem to be more and more schemes aimed at fleecing drivers, I notice that in London many roads now have spouted width restrictions, 2 lanes 6′ 6″ wide with a large gap in the middle and a cctv monitoring the gap; drive through the middle and get a fine, yet in one location on the road behind the camera there have been 3 rapes, a murder and about 20 muggings, do they turn the camera around, no it stays watching the ‘honey trap’ gathering revenue, and to hell with the safety of the residents.
This cut in road safety spending is just another stab in the guts for all of we council tax payers, and of course the council will probably spend all the savings on a shiny full colour news letter telling us that by cutting spending on road safety it has made our roads safer, we should be all familiar with this newspeak by now.

The tech in modern cars makes them safer, unfortunately they are still driven by us, with all our frailties.
A cars safety features such as airbags, auto braking, stability control, impact absorbing crumple zones etc….are completely negated when driven by an idiot texting as he drives at 50mph through town. Paradoxically the safest person would be the driver, cocooned in life saving tech whilst the bits of his victims lay scattered around.
Do we have a breakdown of figures thus
Drivers & passengers killed.
Pedestrians killed
Cyclists killed
Motor cyclists killed.
We could then make year on year comparisons to determine who the roads are safer for.

I am far more concerned with the cuts to OAP facilities and child care – than road safety. It is blindingly obvious that if the council has it’s funding cut – my London council had £35 Million cut whereas a London Tory council had just £3 Million cut – then ALL facilities suffer..

As income decreases so does the ability to pay for insurance MOTs repairs etc etc for cars. There are over 1 MILLION uninsured drivers which will increase – so that will decrease safety. As for Road maintenance it is obvious this will decrease.if there is no money – and there is no money.

The rich will be able to afford the new high tech cars – the poor won’t. – I agree with m – High tech cars are safer for the driver – but those drivers take more risks reducing safety for the rest of us. Yet another con-dem disaster.

@Em.
An unregulated car cannot be insured for driving on the public roads, end of.
@Wavechange
We know what happens to uninsured vehicles, usually the crusher so we are already seizing and crushing ‘illegal’ vehicles as a policy.

Unregulated high end cars, modified cars etc…. this is what trackdays are for, enjoy the thrills of speed and boy racing in a safer more controlled environment than steaming through Epping forest at 3am.
Unfortunately the deliberately uninsured and criminals will always be a problem, until we have a nationwide ANPR which automatically flags up an uninsured / illegal vehicle to the nearest patrol car. Slowley we will get diminish this group until the uninsured driver becomes the glaring exception rather than the near norm we have today.

I’m not all together sure advancing “safety technology” is as good as many think.
I’m not sure gizmos like electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, airbags, and auto-braking systems in themselves really make drivers, or anyone else necessarily more safe.
No amount of technology can fully compensate for lack of driving ability and there is also the tendancy that the safer a driver feels (with all the gizmos) the more recklessly some tend to drive.
Just think if you were driving an old classic with no seat belts how much more exposed would you feel and how much more careful your driving would be?

As for local authority road safety spending well I think festooning every junction with traffic lights which seems standard procedure nowadays causes as many problems as it’s designed to remedy. Near where I live traffic lights have gone up at several junctions where traffic lights never existed before, don’t know why, they wern’t dangerous junctions, traffic conditions have not fundamentally changed. My therory is that highways departments need to exhaust their budgets each year to ensure that budget does not automatically reduce the following year.
Too many lights, especially badly timed lights, cause frustration which can easily manifest itself with accidents further up the road. so they put traffic lights or “traffic calming” there completly unnecessarily.
I think what I’m saying is it’s not necessarily how much you spend but how you spend it.
“Less is often more” and thought should be given to curing the desease of bad driving rather than attempting to treat the symtoms.