Leading highway safety professionals are renewing calls for the  introduce a Road Accident Investigation Branch, similar to those that operate for rail and aviation.

 

Such a resource would provide a better understanding of the causes of accidents and lead to more targeted improvements to help make roads safer, according to the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety’s executive director David Davies and CIHT’s Road Safety Panel member Kate Carpenter.

 

“In depth collision investigation, focused on learning and not blame, should be a top priority,” says David Davies. “Police accident reports (using STATS 19 forms, or now the ‘CRASH’ system) are fine for providing basic data, but they are too superficial to provide a good understanding of the underlying causation factors.

 

“The police serious collision investigation units do a good job at investigating fatal or very serious incidents, but their focus is on whether someone has committed an offence. We need information to help pass on learning.”

 

As a first step to setting up a branch, he suggests the Department for Transport appoints a chief road collision investigator to “send a clear message that we need to think more about the causes of accidents”.

 

David adds that Britain has done very well on reducing road casualties and has one of the lowest rates in the world of deaths per head of the population. “But a lot of the low hanging fruit has gone and we need to become canny about finding out more as to what is causing deaths and serious injuries.”

 

Kate Carpenter agrees that a Road Accident Investigation Branch is desperately needed. “At the moment there is no central co-ordination of findings and lessons learned from incidents. A dedicated Branch could be just what is needed to further improve road safety.”

 

She suggests that a Branch could start by investigating at least a sample of accidents which led to a fatality, but it would be beneficial to investigate all deaths and less severe incidents too.

 

“There is so much information available, from traffic flows to mobile phone data, police accident investigation, asset management, skid resistance of roads and data from vehicle manufacturers.

 

“Imagine if we could collate all of that so we can better understand what the problems are,” Kate adds. “We might be wrong on some things we think we know, or it may confirm what we know and give us evidence so that we can secure funding to make improvements.”

 

Another important area of focus for road safety professionals should be on preventing motorists from being distracted when behind the wheel, according to charity IAM Road Smart’s director of policy and research Neil Greig. “We see distraction as a big issue: not just from mobile phone use but also distraction caused by the vehicle providing an overload of information,” he says.

 

A report published by the charity in November said there were nearly 3000 cases in one recent year where in-vehicle distraction contributed to an accident, representing 3% of all accidents. The report calls for vehicles to be made to ‘support drivers’ to avoid distraction and for smartphone manufacturers and service providers to take more responsibility for the way their equipment is used.

 

It also says that employers must clearly outline the risk of using electronic devices when driving for work and adds that the Highway Code must strengthen its advice regarding distracted driving.

 

“I don’t think that drivers were ever asked if they wanted to be able to swipe and pinch a complex screen in the middle of the dashboard to get the air conditioning to work,” Neil Greig adds. “A whole lot of little things are undermining attempts to create safer roads and are slowing down progress.”

 

The charity’s report also concludes that while vehicle technology is evolving fast, there will be a ‘challenging mix of differently equipped vehicles and drivers on our roads’ for the foreseeable future.

 

“There is a difficult transition ahead,” Neil Greig adds when asked whether autonomous vehicles will eventually lead to safer travel. “If everyone uses driverless vehicles and there are less cars around, we will see safer roads. But a lot of work will be needed to train drivers how to use new vehicles safely.”

 

David Davies adds that he welcomes several autonomous features which are available on some modern vehicles, such as lane keep assist and autonomous emergency braking. But he fears that “drivers will not be capable of rapidly taking back control” in ‘level three or four’ autonomous vehicles, where they can look away or take their hands off the wheel for much of the time.

 

Kate Carpenter points out that the increasing use of technology for driver assist and vehicle automation – designed to improve safety – could actually have a detrimental effect. “History across many sectors of human-computer interaction shows scope for human errors including worsened response times, fatigue, trust and cognitive overload and underload.

 

“If the modern car is doing 30% of the driving task (such as using adaptive cruise control, lane assist or satellite navigation) the motorist should be better at the remaining 70%.

 

“But research shows that what actually happens is the person pays even less attention to the remaining driving task resulting in late reactions and, in highly automated driving, late handover from ‘vehicle drives’ to ‘human drives’. Manufacturers and regulators need to address this challenge.”

 

She also has concerns that motorists may not realise that the vehicle coming towards them is a semi-autonomous vehicle, and make incorrect assumptions about what it may or may not do.

 

Pedestrians and cyclists may just walk or ride in front of a vehicle they assume will automatically stop, but with a mixed manual/autonomous fleet it may not be obvious which cars will stop, she adds.

Aside from in-vehicle technology, David Davies says renewed efforts are needed to discourage motorists from driving without a seatbelt. He also advocates a thorough review of the case for graduated driver licencing for young motorists and says the reintroduction of road safety targets, scrapped by the Coalition Government in 2010, would help “concentrate resources and minds”.

 

And Neil Greig calls for a closer look at the impact large electronic advertising hoardings beside major roads may have on road safety and for a renewed focus on improving rural road safety.