The UK's Campaign for Safe Road Design is playing a lead role in calling on the EU to promote a programme of safety engineering on high-risk roads across Europe. It claims the programme will reduce the annual €160bn (2 per cent of European GDP) cost of road crashes by €50bn.

The Campaign makes its call for action to MEPs tonight (2 December) as the European Road Assessment Programme, EuroRAP, publishes maps for 15 EU countries showing the busy high-risk roads where deaths are concentrated.

The world is moving one step closer to cutting the annual global road death toll of 1.2 million by recognising the crucial role of road design, according to John Dawson, chairman of the UK's Campaign for Safe Road Design.

A joint initiative from the Transport Research Centre of the influential OECD and the International Transport Forum will move the importance of road design further up the international agenda by embracing the "Safe System" approach to transport design. This new approach is being successfully used particularly in the Netherlands, Sweden and some Australian states. It ensures that, in the event of a crash, impact energies remain below the threshold likely to produce either death or serious injury.

Britain can cut its toll of road deaths and serious injuries by a third simply by investing in better road design, saving 30 lives or serious injuries a day and Britain's economy £6bn a year.

According to the Campaign for Safe Road Design, a consortium of the UK's leading road user, road safety and road design bodies, and launched at the House of Lords today a third of Britain's serious injuries or fatalities on the roads are preventable over the next 10 years with just a modest investment - primarily in signs, lines, kerbing and barriers.