By Johnny Sharp

Agilysis specialise in smart tech for highway professionals, particularly local government, and their collision analysis tool CrashMap, commended at this year’s CIHT Awards, has helped identify accident black spots and guide road safety measures for more than a decade. 

And given the role that speed control plays in maintaining road safety, they saw the need for better data about speed compliance across the highway network.

“I thought, is there something similar that could be done with speed data for local authorities?” says Agilysis CEO Richard Owen. “We were working with Berkshire road authorities and managed to create a map to see what the level of compliance was, using some reasonably basic data, without having to get loads of [time-consuming and costly] speed surveys done.”

Suzanne Coles helped develop the analytical tool and she explains the leap forward it offered to users: “I was looking at one authority, and they had a map on their website showing all of their different count points around the authority. It was 400-odd count points across a network of about 4,000 kilometres. So, they're capturing data for 10 percent of their network, but using our tool, they can see speed data for 100 percent. Every single road is covered.”

With Coles having recently developed version 3, the data is becoming more detailed all the time, and while it can be used for enforcement, it can also provide local authorities with detailed information to respond to the public’s concerns about local road safety issues.

“You have a lot of people who come in and complain about speeding down their road, for instance,” says Owen, “and it enables councils to triage those requests, take a report, and say, look, we've got this survey data, and actually, the speed profile looks like this. And if it turns out that they do have a real issue, then they can look to look to take action to address that.”

Darren Divall

Getting closer to the problem

Although the impact of speed on road safety has been proven, there are plenty of other factors involved, and another project that was commended at this year’s awards was Vivacity’s Near Miss Technology, which has been doing impressive work in partnership with Transport for West Midlands (TfWM), after Darren Divall, TfWM’s Road Safety Advisor, sought to address an alarming statistic in the region.

“Pedestrian fatalities were 28.5 percent of our fatality makeup back in 2022, but by 2024 that figure had risen to 43 percent. We were looking for some form of technology to help us better understand the problem. Do we know enough about the footfall, about cycle counts in different areas? Do we know about what risk levels they're exposed to?”

Enter transport data analysis specialists VivaCity, whose Head of Product Matt Shaw takes up the story.

“We pioneered the use of near-miss data to understand unsafe interactions between vehicles and cyclists or pedestrians. The algorithm tracks each road user and takes into consideration distance, speed and time metrics to produce a set of anonymised video clips for road safety officers like Darren to review.”

That data helped address one particular blackspot in Coventry, as Divall explains: “It’s a big bell junction, with a really wide radius, which meant it was a long way for pedestrians to cross the road. It was in a 20mph zone, but there were two schools close by, it’s on a bus route, and it’s a busy throughfare for motor vehicles. 

“The near-miss data showed us it wasn't just about the speed of the vehicles; it was also about where they were driving, and the compliance of drivers. When they were turning right into the junction, a lot of them were cutting straight across on the wrong side of the road to get over to where they wanted to be, driving in front of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users. 

“So, we extended the footpath, reduced the radius of the junction, and put a pedestrian refuge in the middle, so pedestrians don’t have so far to walk across. In the first two months, since that intervention, we’ve reduced the validated near misses for pedestrians by 88.5 percent.”

Register your interest in the 2026 CIHT Awards.