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Children from poor families are paying the price for Britain’s overcrowded roads. Can local initiatives make any difference, asks Sarah Wellard.

Britain is probably the safest country in western Europe to be a motorist or car passenger - proportionately fewer people die on our roads than anywhere else. But when it comes to the risk of child pedestrians being killed or knocked down, we do less well. Only four of our European partners have a worse record on child pedestrian safety. And less well off children are bearing the brunt of the risk. They are five times as likely as their more affluent peers to be killed or injured by traffic while out walking or playing, despite or perhaps because only half as many of their parents own cars.

Ian Roberts, professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that this steep social class gradient is partly explained by where poorer children usually live - near busy roads rather than in leafy suburbs. It’s also about resources - poorer children are less likely to have safe places to play and their parents are less likely to have cars. He explains: "Poor kids walk much more than rich kids, who tend to spend a lot of time in the car. Poorer kids are exposed to busier streets with higher volumes of traffic. If you have to cross a main road on a regular basis you’re more at risk."

Roberts has been studying traffic and child pedestrian safety in the inner London borough of Camden. "If you look at Camden, you find low levels of car ownership and high levels of traffic," he says. "You’ve got masses of through traffic that doesn’t emanate from Camden and doesn’t contribute to the local economy. The benefits and drawbacks of car travel fall on different groups."

This is confirmed by research from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Tony Grayling, associate director says: "We looked at how measures of area deprivation are linked with accident risk across the whole of England. We found that children living in the poorest 10 per cent of neighbourhoods were three times as likely as those in the richest wards to be victims of pedestrian accidents." The IPPR analysis indicates that the increased risk is partly to do with factors in the built environment - traffic speed and volume for example - but also to do with behavioural factors, like whether children play out unsupervised or walk to school.

As Grayling observes, the solution to reducing child accidents depends on your political viewpoint. One view is that it is parents’ responsibility to protect their children from traffic danger, and that they shouldn’t be out on their own. An alternative view is that we should place the onus on drivers to reduce their speed and impose more restrictions on cars.

There are signs that the pendulum is beginning to swing in the direction of more controls on motorists. Improving road safety and tackling the disproportionate number of accidents in deprived areas is now an official public service agreement target. Local authorities are introducing 20 mph zones in many residential areas, reinforced by speed reduction measures like road humps and narrowing. According to the IPPR research, local authorities are tending to place these in poorer areas. However, Grayling adds that councils also respond to public demand. "The articulate middle classes are less likely to have a strong case but more likely to present it," he says.

A handful of local authorities are piloting a more radical approach. Known as "home zones" and based on successful initiatives in Germany and the Netherlands, the idea is to change the way streets are designed and used to give priority to pedestrians and cyclists, including children. The zones aim to turn residential streets into public spaces, increasing opportunities for children to play and promoting a sense of community as well as cutting traffic volumes and speeds (see panel right).

The Department for Education’s big idea for getting people to abandon the school run - which itself adds about 20 per cent to term-time traffic - is to encourage schools to draw up travel plans. Best-practice guidelines recommend that plans should include measures to improve children’s fitness, reduce congestion and casualties and increase use of public transport. All very laudable, except that it doesn’t work. Research conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine shows that even where schools have a travel co-ordinator to work with parents, school travel plans do nothing to reduce parents’ fears or to increase the numbers of children walking or cycling to school.

Kerbcraft is another government-backed scheme, which involves teaching children pedestrian skills. In Walsall, one of 37 councils to have been awarded government funding, co-ordinators have been appointed to recruit volunteers to work with five to seven year olds in 10 primary schools.

No one disagrees that teaching children about road safety is a good idea. But you might well ask how much impact measures aimed at changing children’s behaviour will have on reducing accidents. As the Child Accident Prevention Trust points out, children are easily distracted and make unpredictable pedestrians. Traffic-coping skills are complex and children cannot accurately judge speed and distance until they are around 11. And research carried out by the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick found that five to nine year olds struggle to apply in real life traffic situations what they learn in road safety lessons.

Politicians are reluctant to grasp the nettle and tackle the biggest risk factor of all: traffic volume. Aside from improving public transport, the main way to cut traffic is to increase the marginal cost of motoring. In other words, making it more expensive to drive those extra few miles, so that people use their cars less. We all remember what happened when the government tried to do this through increasing the tax on petrol. The opposition to congestion charging in central London is another example. Roberts says out that even Labour MPs have spoken out against the initiative. "The idea that people who drive into London are poor is complete nonsense. Everybody gets bought off by the transport lobby."

Richard Bourne, social inclusion co-ordinator for Transport 2000 takes a similar view. "At local authority level there is a shift in favour of better pedestrian protection," he says. "But at the level of national transport policy there is no big shift. The government doesn’t dare antagonise motorists and won’t say that the only policy which will succeed is one that persuades people to use cars less."

Parents who can afford it take their children by car. From their point of view it makes perfect sense - their children are safer and it’s more convenient. But for other people’s children it just adds to the risk. If we really want to break the vicious circle, we’ve all got to start driving less. How about a "walk to Westminster" week for starters?

- See website www.homezones.org  for further information

In the zone

Morice Town Home Zone in Plymouth was completed last year. It covers around 1.5 miles of road and includes 155 terraced houses and 253 flats, as well as a junior school, several pubs and other public buildings. Changes to the built environment include raising the road to the same level as the pavement, traffic calming measures and gateways marking entrances to the zone, play facilities and tree-planting. The scheme cost £1.5m and was funded jointly by the local council, single regeneration budget and the government.