Why “road safety” is part of the problem of danger on the roads.

In 1993 the Road Danger Reduction Forum was set up by a group of road safety officers and other transport professionals committed to creating a road environment safe for all road users as a key part of a sustainable transport policy. It may surprise readers to find that this put us up against the dominant thinking of the road safety lobby.

Why? Our view is that what is officially thought of as “road safety” is largely an attempt to accept unacceptable danger from motor traffic. This is not “anti-car”: but just as transport policy cannot be framed just from the viewpoint of the motorist, we believe that road safety policy should not be based on the view of the careless motorist.

This is very much the story of “road safety”: the massive transformation of the car (with seat belts, roll bars, air bags, crumple zones etc) and road environments (with crash barriers, anti-skid surfaces etc) has reduced the need for motorists to be careful. The second major feature of “road safety” is basing appeals to motorists to behave properly primarily on a voluntary code of safety – polite requests rather than the regulatory requirements in corresponding safety regimes in aviation, maritime, industrial or rail safety. Along with this the approach to “vulnerable road users” – actually users of the more benign modes of walking and cycling – has tended to see them as the problem and inherently hazardous.

Indeed there is an important misuse of language here: throughout “road safety” culture being endangered is persistently confused with endangering others, with the word “dangerous” employed to cover both meanings. Indeed, casualty statistics break the first rule of statistical analysis by not comparing like with like. Not surprisingly, “road safety” leads us to view the SUV driver as “safe” and walking as “dangerous”. But for the RDRF the crucial question is “Who is killing, hurting or endangering whom?”

What of the evidence used to back up the complacency of the “road safety” establishment? Fewer deaths over time and compared to other European countries are partly due a decline in usage of the least endangering, healthiest and environmentally friendly modes, namely walking and cycling. Absence of vulnerable people from the road environment does not mean “our roads are getting safer”: indeed, one of the reasons parents do not allow children to walk or cycle is often precisely because roads are seen as dangerous. Then there are factors such as improved emergency medical care, which have nothing to do with “road safety” interventions.

This paints a bleak picture. But the same processes of adapting to perceived hazards (risk compensation) that generate less care from motorists also work the other way around. Cycling policy is now being - correctly – based on the idea of a “critical mass” of cyclists whose presence pressurises drivers to take more note of cyclists. In urban design the evidence of the effects of the “naked streets” approach – removal of pedestrian barriers and road markings previously seen as essential for safety - shows that motorists can and will be more likely to behave properly to pedestrians and cyclists if the presence of enough of these groups of road users requires them to.

We need to reduce danger at source through use of technologies such as automatic on-board speed governors and/or black boxes to analyse crash causes, allied to deterrent law enforcement and insurance programmes. These need to be implemented in association with other interventions designed to control the potential of drivers to endanger others including a default legal burden of responsibility on those who are the source of threat, as exists in some EU member states.

Above all, we require a cultural change without which road safety interventions cannot work. This would mean that endangering the others’ lives becomes unacceptable, not colluded with by the “road safety” establishment. This should involve a wider cultural change: reverting to John Prescott’s commitment to reverse motor traffic growth, and confronting a culture where driving when, where and how each motorist wants is seen as a basic human right.

A small, but necessary part of this change is for transport professionals to accept the substantial evidence backing up the obvious: road users adapt to changes in perceived risk. For those obsessed with number-crunching, the deaths associated with a car-based transport system are predominantly those from health problems stemming from lack of exercise, noxious and greenhouse gas emissions. But then the real issue is moral and political, not numerical.

Robert Davis
Road Danger Reduction Forum