ENGINEERING efforts to cut the number of casualties on Darlington’s roads have proved so successful few changes are necessary, councillors have heard.

The borough council’s place scrutiny committee, which was examining the authority’s road safety work in response to a fatal accident on St Cuthbert’s Way earlier this year, was told the past decade had seen a dramatic decline in the number of road traffic incident injuries in the borough.

While there were 418 slight, 59 serious and 7 fatal accidents in 2006, in the year to date there had been 185 slight, 42 serious and one fatal accident.

The trend in the borough reflects that across the North-East, which has seen the number of fatal accidents over the same period fall from 109 to 37.

The meeting heard analysis of accidents in the borough had revealed the most common age group for road accident victims was those aged 16 to 20, of whom there were more than double the number of victims aged 11 to 15.

Of the 4,840 casualties in the borough since 2005, 2,892 were car occupants, 615 were pedestrians, 455 were cyclists and 401 were travelling in buses.

Dave Winstanley, the authority’s assistant director for highways, told members one of the areas of road safety concern was the Stonebridge junction at the eastern entrance to the town centre, which had seen 11 incidents since it opened in 2014.

Mr Winstanley said in the six years before the junction opened there were 28 accidents.

He said: “We don’t have many hotspots, they are happening sporadically across the borough. There are a couple of locations that we keep monitoring.

Mr Winstanley said a “significant engineering investigation” had been carried out following the fatal accident at the  junction, but “nothing of any significance been found”.

He said: “A lot of accidents now are not to do with road engineering, they are to do with behaviour and other circumstances. There’s not a lot around the borough that can be engineered out these days.”

The meeting was told the this year’s National Highways and Transportation Survey had found the authority was performing above the national average for public satisfaction over road safety.

Mr Winstanley said: “In road safety education we are top out of 113 authorities which took part. The good level of satisfaction is possibly to do with the fact we are quite visible with our road safety programme. We do quite a lot of pedestrian and cycling training for kids.”