Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether his Department has made an assessment of the evidence base for traffic-calming measures introduced recently in (a) Derbyshire and (b) the rest of the UK.

Installation of traffic calming measures is the responsibility of the relevant local highway authority.

Traffic calming provides a proven and effective way of saving lives and reducing casualties. Its primary purpose is to reduce vehicle speeds in areas where inappropriate speed is a problem. It plays an important role in improving road safety, and each 1 mph reduction in vehicle speed resulting from traffic calming has been found to reduce accidents by around 5%.

Traffic calming has been the subject of extensive research. The Department publishes advice for local authorities on designing and installing traffic calming, in Local Transport Note 1/07: Traffic Calming, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-calming-ltn-107. This brings together a summary of the research commissioned by the Department and its predecessors, together with some research from external sources, to provide advice on the use of traffic calming measures today.