Number of Road Deaths Lowest Since Records Began

Reported Road Casualties Great Britain (RRCGB), is the official statistical publication of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) on traffic casualties, published since 1951 but with statistics going back to 1926.

Up until very recently, cars had very narrow tires, weedy headlights, the sort of very basic brakes you'd find on a bike today, no crumple zones, no seatbelts and a terrible propensity to set on fire if involved in a collision. Plus for a period of that time there were no speed limits and drink driving was common, as compared to being shunned today. Also, roads were pretty much all single track with no barriers to stop head-on collisions.

Although the number of vehicles registered for use on the roads has increased 23-fold since 1926, the number of deaths is less than a fifth of what it was at is peak in 1940, when a whopping 8,609 people were killed on UK roads, compared to 1,713 deaths in 2013:

Source: Wikipedia

Another way to look at this is the number of accidents per 100 vehicles and the number of deaths per 1000 vehicles, which shows that despite the huge increase in vehicles on our roads they are now safer than ever:

Source: parliament.uk

In fact, deaths on UK roads are half what they were in 1999 when Great Britain had the safest roads in Europe apart from Sweden. 

At present there's an awful lot of work being done to replace central reservations on motorways with concrete barriers that can't be breached, reducing deaths by head-on collisions further on the very roads on which most UK motoring miles are driven. According to the Highways Agency there are more than 400 crossover accidents where vehicles break through the central reservation barrier each year in the UK and about 40 deaths and it is estimated that 70% of these will be prevented by the new concrete barriers.