Blog

There is no denying that local councils – who own and manage the vast majority of the UK’s roads network – are cash strapped. Many local authorities barely have enough finance to keep up with the maintenance of their highway infrastructure.

This has often led to a reactive rather than proactive approach to road safety improvements across highways assets. At the same time, there’s also a growing concern that road fatalities appear to have stopped falling in the last decade.

Department for Transport (DfT) data revealed that 1,695 people were killed in the UK during 2023, with another 28,967 seriously injured. This figure was similar to data from a decade prior, with 1,854 road deaths recorded in 2014, which suggests that the significant falls in fatalities in previous decades have ceased.

Even as technology has improved and roads authorities have attempted to implement new measures, they have struggled to have a significant impact on the number of fatalities. As a result, the ambition of zero harm continues to appear an unattainable one.

With this in mind, NCE partnered with Arcadis and Michelin Mobility Intelligence to host a roundtable with industry experts to discuss what tools are available to aid the road safety journey and what might be holding back meaningful change.

Data potential

Much of the engineering world has grown accustomed to expanded and more relevant data for decision-making. While for a long time there was a gap in such data in terms of detail about the public’s movements on the roads, this is now changing.

Innovations have seen emerging data on driver behaviour that can provide detailed information on locations and behaviours such as harsh braking, cornering, aggressive acceleration and speeding. Just as importantly, risk models derived from these could now aid the road safety journey.

This led Arcadis to partner with Michelin to utilise its extensive data to better understand what can be done.

“Work we’ve done with Michelin has given us the ability to be more proactive,” said Arcadis innovation director Alex Walton. “The ability to understand across the network where people are having near misses and that deeper understanding of the safety pyramid [also known as Heinrich’s Safety Triangle], just like we do in workplace safety, allows us to have a better evidence base. That opens up opportunities to identify the risks or diagnose the problems that might not have been possible before. And that enables us to come up with better, more targeted interventions.”

Walton explained: “You can bucket that into different categories, identifying where the risky locations are and diagnosing what’s happening. That allows you to come up with more targeted interventions, giving you the right thing at the right place and a better return on investment.”

This presents an opportunity to address a longstanding concern in the safety arena. As Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) deputy executive director Margaret Winchcomb said: “There are so many policy areas which are calling for change in transport, and safety is something that was covered across all of them. But maybe what wasn’t being promoted as significantly as it could be, was impact.”

Of course, one of the challenges with expanding the availability of data is that too much data effectively becomes no data because decision makers simply cannot examine and analyse it all.

This would be a lost opportunity for road safety. The roundtable discussed how, for a long time, the only reliable data was on recorded collisions. This represented a small sample size compared to the unrecorded and thus unavailable near misses that would point to likely future collisions at different locations.

So, to suddenly have access to accurate near miss data in real time, spanning the UK’s entire highways network, requires someone to break it down in ways that help decision makers recognise the findings that really matter.

Michelin Mobility Intelligence global strategic partnerships manager Chris Stokes set out what that means. “There’s now lots of data, so you have to be cognisant of paralysis by analysis. There are so many places to look, so decision makers have to decide on their priorities.

“For example, are you trying to focus on making school zones safer? If so, we need to focus only on those types of events that have happened within school zones. Or if you want to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured (KSIs), we can focus on the data that indicates where the next KSI crash points are likely to be, based on driver behaviour and near misses.”

Stokes points out that newly available data can also help identify why a particular site might have a propensity for collisions and even KSIs. “If you already know that a location has collisions and you want to understand why, then the data can show the driver behaviours there. In the hands of specialist road engineers, that can help inform the interventions needed to significantly improve safety.”

Absence of people

One of the reasons data in this form may be of particular value is that in some areas roads may be unsafe, but pedestrians themselves are in effect solving the problem by not going there.

The roundtable discussed how this may manifest in ways that seriously diminish quality of life for some of the most vulnerable in society, while still leaving others at risk.

Slough Council executive director regeneration, housing and environment Pat Hayes explained: “The public often already knows where isn’t safe on local roads, because they know they feel unsafe in those locations. They stay away from those places, but that is not the kind of safety we’re trying to achieve in our communities.”

At the same time, while local people may know that a particular junction or stretch of roads is unsafe, people visiting the area are unlikely to, which raises their risk.

Perhaps the worst impact of this, however, is on vulnerable people such as young parents, disabled people and people with mobility challenges. As the roundtable discussed, vulnerable people have traditionally effectively removed themselves from the data pool, because they don’t feel safe walking or driving their wheelchair on the roads. In the worst cases, they stay at home and become isolated from the community and services they may need.

This should be an issue that the public and decision makers will be motivated to change. Chartered Institution of Highways and Transport head of policy and technical practice Justin Ward says utilising data should help challenge this and increase accessibility.

“I think part of using the data is actually telling a story. You can deliver multiple benefits if you focus on making urban areas more balanced in terms of access and mobility for people, including wheelchair users. And you can use the data to help people see the nature of the problem and its solution.”

Maximising impact

One challenge in getting all of this right, is that budgets across local authorities are constrained and have extensive priorities placed upon them. Those priorities can be entirely unrelated to highways, or can be related to very different issues on the roads.

Wiltshire Council director of highways and transport Samantha Howell said: “We’ve just been through local elections and the number one issue without fail in a highways setting is potholes.

“We have a lot of potholes but this is actually about road safety. For me, the challenge is the balance in our stakeholders seeing how speed reductions are a panacea to all of our road safety issues.

“We have been fortunate to receive an extra £2.5M for road safety improvements, but we’re really trying to challenge the new [local authority] administration, not just to do the shiny new things like the junction improvements and the new cycle schemes, but actually invest in the data.”

This is not a small challenge. Despite nearly 1,700 people dying on our roads each year, road safety has not been a notable political issue subject to public outcry. As such, safety has to fight for its place within decision-making.

National Highways head of programme delivery for road safety Chris Spencer illustrated how big a challenge that has been at times when dealing with Benefit Cost Ratios (BCR).

“One of the things we’ve been doing over the last six months in particular is trying to highlight that there are other aspects of a business case than just a BCR,” he says.

“Very timely, the DfT has recently published its review of the green book that even says people aren’t using BCRs effectively. They are just one part of an overall business case.

“We need to do a better job as an industry of presenting risk, and strategic management of aspects of the business case, not just the economic side of things.”

According to Spencer, this does happen in some cases and schemes have gone forward for non-BCR reasons such as Prevention of Future Deaths reports from coroners.

At the same time, good data on near misses has a business case value too, helping to demonstrate problem areas empirically in order to secure additional funding.

Walton pointed out that accurate information on risk can be invaluable for those making the case for funding proactive safety interventions. In a recent project on which Arcadis partnered with Warwickshire Council, it used data from Michelin to secure an additional £2.5M of funding for schemes that “wouldn’t otherwise be funded”.

Raising attention

Unfortunately, lack of political attention on road safety is also an ongoing challenge. London Borough of Merton former director of public realm Jefferson Nwokeoma was upfront about this. “We have to be realistic. If you speak to any council leader, I think road safety probably will be somewhere near the very bottom of their priorities at the moment because they are focusing on issues that have captured the national imagination.”

Ward noted that one way to overcome the funding question is to rethink the systems that provide it.

“We did a piece of work recently looking at funding and, in short, we looked at the question, could a funding settlement similar to how the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) approaches its settlements with National Highways work for local roads?” he said.

“What would be the benefits if there could be a similar long term funding settlement for local roads over a five-year period. Would there be efficiencies in that? Not necessarily in cost savings, but would we be able to deliver extra value for the taxpayer and can we invest those savings into other things, including maintenance schemes?”

Ward’s conclusion was that, ultimately, longer term funding would make it easier to adopt new practices and technologies, including those relating to data.

Nwokeoma also noted that the ORR’s approach is potentially a model for future solutions, given that it can hold National Highways to account on road safety.

Data as the solution

With the wealth of data that is currently unavailable representing an untapped asset that can help shape road safety solutions, the roundtable also discussed how the data itself may be part of the solution to changing the public’s and decision makers’ attitudes.

Winchcomb said there is a real need to “elevate” road safety in the national consciousness. She added that the evidence that the data provides could support that message by making clear that zero harm is not an unachievable ambition.

Indeed, where this happens, the impact can be significant. Chris Stark, road safety group manager at West Sussex County Council, explained the extent to which data is now incorporated into their work. “I’ve got a cabinet member who’s fully behind everything that I’m doing. I’ve managed to persuade her of the importance of road safety. We have used hard breaking data as a trial to help support the traditional method of crash identification, and we’ve also surveyed a large number of our roads.”

This has had tangible benefits, with West Sussex returning to a proactive whole-route strategy for road safety interventions, to avoid making one place safe, only to move the problem further down the road – literally. So it is clear that with the right approach, change is possible.

• In association with Michelin Mobility Intelligence and Arcadis

Like what you’ve read? To receive New Civil Engineer’s daily and weekly newsletters click here.