The move towards fully adopting a safe systems approach, where we start to look beyond isolated interventions, will be one of the key road safety themes for 2024. 

Instead of just spending some money on the enforcement of a particular issue or behaviour, let's look more at the different wraparound pillars: enforcement might be one aspect, but how do we also start to raise awareness to change behaviours? 

How we design the infrastructure around people’s misuse of different systems becomes important, rather than simply focusing on enforcement to catch those who might be infracting. We also need to avoid a blame culture when people do things that are contrary to a safe approach, recognising that people make mistakes and that mistakes occur. 

At the same time, we need to design infrastructure to ensure that we’re always looking at ways of improving what we do, creating and using that feedback loop.

The role of speed

The next theme is the speed question. We've started some national conversations around the role that speed plays in safety and it's probably the metric that is one of the most significant contributors to a vast array of different events. We've seen Wales go to a 20mph limit and I think the data is starting to show that speeds are lowering in those environments. 

But when we start to look at it from a transport planning perspective, we need to consider how we take those requirements to feed into road design. We need to incorporate the consequences and changes to address an environment that's being used differently now. 

Drainage patterns on roads, for example, might need to be addressed where lower tyre speeds result in water spraying in different directions. We now need to turn that national conversation into applied action.

We face so many budgetary constraints, particularly on large infrastructure projects, but it also places more emphasis on the maintenance renewals process. We must take the same approach to that as we would when improving road safety for massive new infrastructure schemes. Maintenance covers so many events and changes, so we need to focus on creating the same level of rigour to those day-to-day activities as we do on new projects.

Planning for emerging mobility

The final theme is how we start to consider the implications of new forms of mobility.

At the Smart Mobility Living Lab, we look at growing trends in transport and mobility, and their role in the real world. When we started about five years ago, micromobility scooters didn’t exist: their impact has changed the built environment fundamentally and the way people use networks. We've also seen an explosion in the number of app-based delivery companies, involving lots of moped deliveries. 

We're seeing the road network being used in different ways, from a planning perspective. We now need to find ways to accommodate those new modes and approaches to different modes being used.

The increasing amount of available data will provide the evidence to build insights around what we're seeing from new modes and the way they're being used, which can then be reflected in our designs. 

James Long was in conversation with Craig Thomas

Image: Looking forward to road planning in 2024; credit: Shutterstock

James Long