COULD the tide be turning in the fight against bad driving on Bradford’s roads?

At a meeting this week, councillors on the Regeneration and Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee received an update on ongoing work to reduce road casualties in the district and Operation Steerside.

A report to councillors ahead of the meeting revealed KSIs (Killed and Serious Injuries) in 2018 dropped by 7.8 per cent to 177 from 192 in 2017.

Councillor Ralph Berry (Lab, Wibsey) said the “myth” of not being able to tackle the problem was beginning to be busted and it was beginning to be turned around.

Referring to the meeting on Twitter, he spoke of the “determined” impact of Steerside and the drop in KSIs and said: “Bradford driving is beginning to change. Long way to go but very welcome.”

The full figures for 2019 were not available, but for the first three quarters of the year, there was a 10.3 per cent reduction compared with the same period in the previous year.

Simon D’Vali, Principal Highways Engineer at Bradford Council, said while he didn’t want to speculate on what the outcome would be, it was “looking very positive”.

While there has been reductions, fatalities in 2018 increased from 15 to 10 in the previous year.

Mr D'Vali said the analysis in each of those cases was being looked at and work is ongoing with collision investigators and more would be reported back when there was a full picture.

Operation Steerside, which began back in 2016 on light of the Telegraph & Argus’s Stop the Danger Drivers campaign, was also highlighted.

Since it began, the approach has widened to not only look at enforcement, but to work in a collaborative way to look at education and prevention.

Councillor Joanne Dodds (Lab, Great Horton) said: “Sometimes parents need that education.”

She touched on examples she had seen around schools, including not wearing seatbelts and crossing the road in dangerous situations.

“You think, they are not leading by example,” she said.

The meeting also heard about the possibility of adopting Vision Zero, a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, which was first implemented in Sweden in the 1990s.

According to the Vision Zero Network, the approach recognizes that people will sometimes make mistakes, so the road system and related policies should be designed to ensure those inevitable mistakes do not result in severe injuries or fatalities.

"Vision Zero is not a slogan, not a tagline, not even just a programme," it says.

"It is a fundamentally different way to approach traffic safety.

"Communities that want to succeed at Vision Zero need to acknowledge that business as usual is not enough and that systemic changes are needed to make meaningful progress."