To support this we will work towards a 'Safe System' approach, which provides a more forgiving road system that is designed to protect people from death and serious injury. To do this we need to improve the safety of all parts of the system - roads and roadsides, speeds, vehicles, and road use - so that if one part fails, other parts will still protect the people involved.

We use the 3 E’s of Education, Engineering and Enforcement to further drive down the number of casualties on South Yorkshire roads. As a result of our commitment to delivering this strategy the public of South Yorkshire can expect to see:

• an extensive programme of community engagement and publicity activity, particularly focused on the main casualty groups including young people aged 17-24 years, in a bid to achieve a shift in attitudes and behaviour towards safer roads use
• a programme of safer roads engineering schemes and local safety schemes of approximately £1.6m per year
• more police and camera enforcement of road traffic laws in a bid to tackle poor driver behaviour which can negatively impact on road safety

There are some major challenges ahead in road safety which we will have to adapt and respond to in future years; increasing traffic levels and associated impacts on the environment and our health, advances in driver assistance systems and automated vehicle technology and potential policy changes at a national and European level. All this will need to be managed against a backdrop of reducing public sector funding and the resulting impacts this will have on building, operating and maintaining our road network. This document sets out our overarching approach to providing an intelligence-led casualty reduction service over the next 10 years. More details about specific activity is contained within our SRP action plans and operational plans. An annual plan will summarise our progress and set out our priorities for the coming year. 

It is our hope that all our partners and stakeholders, working together with our communities, businesses and individual members of the public will join together to help deliver improvements in road safety. By adopting positive attitudes and behaviours and sharing the responsibility for road safety outcomes we can make a big difference and prevent the needless pain, grief and suffering associated with each and every road traffic collision.

*The Collision Recording and Sharing (CRASH) system is a data collection tool being rolled out by the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Home Office. It is has been adopted in around half of the Police Forces in the UK and ensures the data to be input and stored in standard formats set out by the DfT, as such it has standardised the way that the severity of serious casualties is defined, thus removing the responsibility of this decision from the attending Officer.