Road deaths fell below 3,000 last year for the first time since records began in 1926.

Motoring groups said that better car safety technology and greater compliance with the speed limit were the two key factors behind the fall in deaths.

The greatest improvement was in the number of child deaths, which fell by 28 per cent compared with 2006.

The road network is now eight times safer per mile travelled than it was in 1966, when deaths reached a postwar peak of 7,985. There were 2,943 deaths last year, seven per cent fewer than in 2006. The number killed was down for every category of road user except for goods vehicle drivers.

Road deaths had fluctuated between 3,200 and 3,600 since 1994 and last year’s total appears to mark a significant shift towards safer driving.

Last year was the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the EuroNCAP crash-test rating system. The average car in 1997 gained between two and three stars, compared with four or five stars in 2007, owing to the almost universal introduction in new cars of ABS brakes and multiple airbags.

The proportion of cars exceeding the speed limit on residential roads has fallen sharply in the past decade, down from almost three quarters in 1996 to only half in 2006.

The overall improvement masked some poor performances, with deaths rising sharply in Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Kent, Lincolnshire and Wiltshire. There was little improvement in safety on rural roads. A total of 121 children under 16 died on the roads last year, down from 169 in 2006 and less than half the number killed each year during the mid1990s.

The death rate for car occupants fell twice as fast as for pedestrians and cyclists. There were 1,431 deaths in cars - 11 per cent down on 2006. The number of pedestrians killed fell by 5 per cent to 644 and the number of cyclists by 7 per cent to 146. However, serious injuries among cyclists rose for the third successive year to 2,428. This was partly because of the doubling since 2000 of cycling in London, where there has been a steep rise in low-speed collisions.

There were 588 motorcyclists killed last year, a fall of only 2 per cent on 2006. Motorcycle deaths have been on an upward trend in the last decade from a low of 440 in 1996.

Edmund King, president of the AA, said speed cameras were partly responsible for the reduction in deaths because they had prompted many drivers to pay much closer attention to the limits. Speeding offences reached a peak of 2.1 million in 2005 and fell by 150,000 the following year, the steepest reduction since the introduction of cameras in 1992.

Mr King said: “Drivers are now much more tuned into the fact that speeding can kill and that it isn’t just a bit of fun. The focus on speeding has changed the mentality of drivers and you now see pedestrians waving at cars to slow down.”

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