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it’s great to hear about proactive development of training to keep children safe. I judge CIHT’s annual road safety awards and as I work in infrastruture (though I have a BSc in psychology as well.) we always have someone specialised in evaluation of educational initiatives, especially Liz Box of RAC Foundation whose PhD in educational interventions for road safety gave her detailed and current insight into the often counter-intuitive outcomes. through working with Liz and reading about her research as well as my own psychology studies I’ve found that it’s easy to do something that seems to be an improvement but is actually neutral or even adverse. for example recall of a message might be measured as better but that might translate to higher confidence/less caution in a real world environment, meaning there was no actual reduction in risk and potentially an adverse net effect. we know this is common in interventions for older children/teens and in skid-training for adults. Off-road driving training, considered self-evidently good experience can give more confidence (long term effect) but with very short term skills improvement (people dont remember how to distinguish front from rear wheel skid for example) and a resulting increase in subsequent collision involvement. Do you have a local academic specialist in the relevant area of psychology supporting the scheme approach and measurement of outcomes to identify and tweak any factors that might have these unintended adverse outcomes? sometimes they can give a brief overview and suggestions as an uncharged support before sharing with other authorities, or other authorities might have this support and be able to bring that to the programme?
I agree with Andrew’s observations above and would add that the speed limit on the dual carriageway is in my view too high for the character and form of the route. I would personally close that gap and make it left-in-left-out. there is a long standing collision history (see https://www.think.gov.uk/thinkmap/) involving vulnerable users: Pedestrians, cyclists, motorcylists. this is often a good indication that the speed limit (and actual traffic speed) is too high. the safe system approach we use now guides that speeds must be consistent with the firm; the type of usage here in my view calls for 30mph limit.
IThere also looks like there is space to reallocate roadspace and create a segregated cycle route, it doesnt look a very cycle friendly network at present!
fully agree with Andrew fraser’s observations on limitations of STATS19: it’s an imperfect tool, only covers injury collsions, and there is no real data on damage only collisions – which are considered to outnumber injury incidents by maybe 10 to 1.
there’s a lot of data around breakdowns for motorways because it underpins the massive scale of risk analysis of over 100 motorway hazards on all motorways – of which live lane stop (peak) and live lane stop (off peak) are just two. the analysis has only been done to extreme detail level for smart motorway sections (implemented or planned and deferred) but it’s likely that the relative proportions of breakdowns versus discretionary stop proportions apply everywhere.
it’s therefore also vital to understand that discretionary stops out-number breakdowns many times over even on high speed roads. For example, in Smart Motorway emergency areas (the new orange laybys for emergencies only), 74% of stops are illegal discretionary stops i.e. three illegal stops for each legal stop for breakdown (or ill driver or stop following a minor collision). things we see people do in those stops: dog walking; baby-changing; fag break; loo stop; phone call; waiting for freinds to catch up; getting things out of the boot etc. we also know that cars can ‘limp’ much further than we might imagine; this was only discovered by analysing the frequency of emeergency area laybys and live lane stop frequency. you’d expect more laybys = fewer live lane stops, but surprisingly that is *not* the case, it’s pretty random. it seems a stop is largely either:
1. catastrophic and cannot limp at all (not EVs do this more than ICE vehicles: no power, often means wheels stop turning, so it will get worse over time.)
2. less catastrophic and can limp to alayby whether 500m or 1500m awaydata are not collected in the same way for all purpose trunk roads because there is no technology to detect them and most are not reported by drivers or others; lack of traffic officers on those roads means not seen by them generally, they’ve been reassinged mainly to motorway sites (which ironcially have far fewer colllisions than APTR). people stuck on APTR phone breakdown provider and/or friends and family and the highway authority has no record of the event. There is almost no data at all on local roads that don’t have the same control centre operations as motorway/APTR network (Ntional Highways in England and devolved assembly networks in wales/scotland).
overall this means we know little about breakdowns on local roads, and have to use first-principle approach to risk management. searching STATS19 for various key words ‘breakdown; stop; strand; stuck; ill) and the contributory factors (even less reliably used) is all you can do I think. this is why you should always get full data including written free-text fields for location and circumstances, not just rely on coded fields.
agree Rod this is a fundamental inconsistency. e-scooter speed limit mainly benefits the rider, and to a lesser extent others around them, whereas failure to implement full-control ISA – which interestingly the vehicle tech expert Richard Cuerden of TRL opposed – would mainly benefit people outside the vehicle (50% of KSI being vulnerable users outside cars/goods vehicles etc i.e ped/cycle/PTW)
that’s a great question but I don’t know where anyone could collate this because no national travel surveys ask about illegal activity. I’m not aware of any monitoring of activity rate. by chance I came upon a cycle-under-HGV incident (miraculously the cyclist escaped) and stopped to help, and the WPC who was there shouted at a passing escooter rider passing to get off (he was on the road) – he shouted “well where am I supposed to ride then?” – seemingly unaware that the answer was ‘nowhere’!
once these are made legal as seems likely, the older illegal ones (not speed limited etc) will be hard to detect and remain an issue.
Hi Jane, useful rural roads synopsis info here (and many other good documents for reference): https://www.rospa.com/road-safety/projects/road-safety-observatory
Kind regards,
Kate
