Delegates to the World Road Association UK Congress in Birmingham heard from UK and international speakers about latest developments on how highway policy and engineering can improve road safety. The event was hosted by CIHT, which provides the secretariat for WRA UK.

 

UK First Delegate to the World Road Association Roy Brannen outlined the global challenge to road safety. Mr Brannen explained the international efforts – in particular the United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety (from 2011 to 2021) – to reduce the number of road accident deaths from a predicted 1.9M in 2020 to one million.

 

Mr Brannen also introduced the World Road Association’s flagship product, the Road Safety Manual, to be launched next year. This manual will be a global resource, particularly useful in low to middle income countries, for adopting a ‘safe system’ approach to road safety.

 

Matts-Åke Belin from the Swedish Transport Administration explained more about the safe system approach: in Sweden they have adopted a ‘Vision Zero’ approach – which refers to the fact that they think no one should be killed or seriously injured on the road network. Matts said that the traditional view of road safety was that individual road user behavior is to blame for an incident and to improve safety the behavior of the road user has to change.

 

The new safe systems approach is that system designers have a primary responsibility to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries. This means that instead of trying to change road users’ behaviour, safer car design and improved road environment should be introduced instead. He added that the roll-out of more median crash barriers in Sweden had reduced the number of people killed in head-on collisions over the last 10 years from around 20 to fewer than five a year.

 

In England too the Highways Agency has its ‘Aiming for Zero’ strategy – this one aimed at ensuring that none of its road workers comes to harm in the course of their work. “The method used to lessen the risk has been to reduce the number of signs put out around roadworks,” he said. “Trials of omitting the 200 and 600 yard wicket signs before lane closures have been successful in reducing carriageway crossings by a tenth and saving £1.5M on the M25.”

 

The agency’s programme manager Ian Smith explained that the fatality rate for road workers is about 1 in 1000 whereas for road users it is only 1 in 158,000. Also, reducing the number of cones used on a standard Chapter 8 traffic taper from 51 to 31 limited the road worker’s exposure to risk as the time to lay the cones was reduced by 33%, he said. Transport for London’s Paul Lavelle then highlighted some practical measures that are being trialed to help support the Major’s belief that a city that promotes cycling is a civilised city. He illustrated some innovative trials such as using box plants to segregate cyclists from motorists in Camden.

 

Lucy Wickham of Mouchel and Kate Carpenter from Jacobs brought delegates up to date on developments in ‘Managed Motorways’ or, as they are now called, ‘Smart Motorways.’

 

Kate outlined such a scheme for the new Forth road crossing in Scotland. The existing bridge, which carries an all-purpose road, is failing, so the replacement crossing will carry the motorway traffic from the M90. From south of Humbie railway bridge the hard shoulder will also act as a bus lane. To avoid any confusion the gantries will carry speed limit signs for the outside lanes but the bus lane and hard shoulder will not carry speed limits to avoid giving the impression that all traffic may travel on it. An agreement has been made with bus companies that public service vehicles will travel no faster than 40MPH. Delegates also listened to a presentation on pavement bollard design.

 

Vehicles running off the road can be prevented from striking buildings in congested cities and potentially injuring pedestrians by less obtrusive bollards than were previously used. Britain leads in the design of such bollards which can now be supplied with much shallower foundations to avoid having to re-route utilities and can even be specified by architects to be transparent with light within but are still tough enough to stop runaway vehicles from mounting pavements.