Governments around the world must do more to understand possible road safety challenges associated with new in-vehicle technology, delegates to a Parliamentary lecture heard on Monday evening.

Global road safety advisor Tony Bliss from Monash University in Australia told the 25th Westminster Lecture on Transport Safety that the potential safety risks associated with the introduction of connected and automated vehicles to strategic road networks “should be anticipated and addressed well in advance of potential problems arising”.

“It cannot be assumed that past practices will suffice, or that emerging safety issues can be easily worked around once they occur,” he said. “We are on the threshold of something new where rapid change is a reality and it would be timely for countries to review their capability to successfully manage it.”

He added that ‘vehicle to vehicle’, ‘vehicle to infrastructure’ and ‘vehicle to vulnerable road user’ communications are expected to offer further safety and traffic management gains in the near future. But while technological capacity is increasing rapidly, human cognitive capacity is not. “How do we ensure that the technology works as intended and behavioural adaptation does not negate its effectiveness?” he asked.

Mr Bliss also used the lecture to explore whether public expectations of governments are being met in the delivery of road safety management. “In my view, broadly speaking, they are not,” he remarked. “Road safety as a global priority is receiving little government attention.”

He said that there is a growing recognition that the elimination of deaths and serious injuries for significant sections of the road network “is already a reasonable expectation”. But he lamented the fact that road crashes around the world involving young people have seen “little if any improvement” over two decades.

“After more than a hundred years of motorisation, crash risks for young people in our road systems are still not being effectively managed,” he added. “Perhaps we should think a bit harder about this.”

The 25th Westminster Lecture on Transport Safety was organised by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety and was sponsored by the Direct Line Group and the FIA Foundation.