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Road Danger Reduction Conference today
http://rdrf.org.uk/2014/09/22/conference-on-road-danger-reduction-and-enforcement-in-london/The focus is on enforcement of dangerous driving
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Never mind the party political jockeying for position in the Mayoral race, Sadiq Khan's team here has the right idea about road danger at junctions by taking into consideration all deaths, irrespective of mode.
An interesting list of junctions, too.
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A vaguely RDR-sounding initiative with a somewhat RS flavour:
Should it even need a 'pledge', bearing in mind that that's probably just a peg to hang the campaign on?
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The difference is that the same behaviour on a bike tends to predominantly cause intimidation and annoyance. In a car, it can and does change or end lives every single day. This can sound like an excuse for poor cycling. It’s not. It’s a plea for proportion and context.
Peter Walker sums up road danger reduction principles in this neat articlehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/25/road-safety-cyclist-hating-close-pass-cars
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Link didn't work for me for some reason:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/25/road-safety-cyclist-hating-close-pass-cars -
Great comment Re: Richmond Park:
Speed restrictions mean nothing to these licra louts, they will also harass any car driver that has the temerity to overtake them.
And they feed on the car drivers who don't. The great pack — the so-called peloton — of wheeled piranhas closing around the wounded, innocent Nissan that wasn't fast enough to get away. You might see a cog or sprocket fly away from the squawking frenzy, but when the peloton moves on there will be nothing left but the socks of the driver and (maybe) their passengers.
Skateboarders, rollerbladers and other scavengers will hope to feed on those socks, as the great car herd moves on.
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Bit quiet here. This is an interesting article, mainly on the situation in the US, where the need to travel has been increasing, and alongside other factors has been causing a very worrying increase in collisions involving vulnerable road users.
Here is what the frustrated safety experts will tell you: Americans are driving more than ever, more than residents of any other country. More of them than ever are living in cities and out in urban sprawl; a growing number of pedestrian fatalities occur on the fringes of cities, where high-volume, high-speed roads exist in close proximity to the places where people live, work, and shop. Speed limits have increased across the country over the past 20 years, despite robust evidence that even slight increases in speed dramatically increase the likelihood of killing pedestrians (car passengers, too – but the increase is not as steep, thanks to improvements in the design of car frames, airbags and seatbelts). American road engineers tend to assume people will speed, and so design roads to accommodate speeding; this, in turn, facilitates more speeding, which soon enough makes higher speed limits feel reasonable. And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit. SUVs are also the most profitable cars on the market, for the simple reason buyers are willing to pay more for them. As with speeding, there appears to be a self-perpetuating cycle at work: the increased presence of large cars on the road makes them feel more dangerous, which makes owning a large car yourself feel more comforting.
More fundamentally, the US is the country in the world most shaped, physically and culturally, by the presumption that the uninterrupted flow of car traffic is an obvious public good, one that deserves to trump all others in the road planning process. Many of its younger cities are designed almost entirely around planning paradigms in which pedestrians were either ignored or factored only as nuisances. Cars move fast and are heavy and hard; humans on foot move slower and are made of flesh and bone. “The layperson can realise, if they think about it for a minute, that if you want to keep people safe, you have to design streets differently,” says Dumbaugh. “You have to slow the cars down. You have to recognise the reality of road users who aren’t in cars. You have to design roads so people in cars take notice of their fellow road users. But these basic realisations aren’t things the US transportation system knows or integrates into practice. And so people keep getting killed.”
This is a very good observation:
While safety experts tend to focus on broad factors – the road environment and what types of behaviour it encourages – America’s cultural discourse on road safety tends to go in the opposite direction, zooming in on that most American of variables: the individual. It is not cars, car culture or bad, car-centric planning that kill pedestrians. Instead, it is individuals making bad choices about how to use the roads.
However, the whole article is worth reading in full if you're interested in this sort of topic. Needless to say, road danger reduction is a process which attempts to prevent the sort of developments described in the article; the sticking-plaster approach of 'road safety' as an excuse for ineffective or absent action will never deliver any significant benefits and will in fact contribute to the problem.
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Saw this ad from Volvo on Youtube just now.
Interesting tech development in terms of speed caps and limiters, driver monitoring cameras to stop drink driving etc. And interesting how Volvo are framing it as comparable to how people objected to seat belts decades ago:
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as comparable to how people objected to seat belts decades ago
Some people still do, and with good reason.
http://www.john-adams.co.uk/2009/11/05/seat-belts-another-look-at-the-data/
(See also the original, linked article.)
I'll look at the new Volvo stuff, but in general tech innovations do not bring about the 'safety' improvements they're credited with, least of all by a car company hawking its latest rubbish.
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Road Danger Reduction Forum: Manifesto 2024
Move UK away from dependence on private motor transport, which is unsustainable, wasteful, unsafe and is a deterrent to walking and cycling, by incentivising sustainable, active travel and public transport and by deterring unnecessary motor vehicle use by road pricing.
Cut the £30 billion road building budget and reallocate for sustainable transport including:
£2 billion p.a. for Active Travel routes to deliver target of 50% of urban trips on foot or by bicycle by 2030.
Enforce road traffic law effectively through a substantial increase in roads policing, including national support for 3rd party reporting, with emphasis on minor penalties for common offences implicated in causing death and injury to others. Allocate an additional £500 million p.a. to be spent on road traffic policing.
Implement a National Road Safety Strategy with headline targets to reduce the danger that road users can pose to others, the establishment of a Road Safety Investigation Branch and lower speed limits with default of 20mph on urban roads and 40mph max on country lanes.
Legislate for and incentivise use of smaller, slower, safer, sustainable motor vehicles for passengers and freight. Taxation should be based on vehicle size, weight, and fuel with an objective being the reduction of use of SUVs in urban areas.
Commission a review of all road traffic laws to secure “road justice”.
Oliver Schick
pifko
Alex_JJ
chris0
mespilus
rhb-
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Road Danger Reduction
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@skydancer
I've had the best ride in Spain a while ago because the Spanish made a huge effort in making sure everyone understood the 1.5 metres overtake rules.
They even have a TV commercial showing a CGI of a car slowing down to overtake a cyclists.
the UK would hugely benefit from this, is there's a reason why no one want to do this?