Road Safety

Scott Arthur Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andy MacNae]

My hon. Friend makes that vital point extremely well. I will touch on it again later, but young drivers are an important topic that merits a debate in its own right.

On feeling safe or unsafe on roads and the impact of that, we can take the example of active travel. The biggest reason why people do not walk or cycle to work or school is concern over road safety. This forces people to travel by car, with all the impacts that brings and accentuating all the issues we are talking about.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

I rise at the point when the Deputy Speaker is changing; it feels like something from “Dr Who”—[Laughter.] Apologies, I was thinking out loud there.

This debate is on an extremely important subject for my hon. Friend’s constituents. On active travel, good habits start early in life, and that is particularly true of walking and cycling. In Edinburgh South West, parents and residents are keen to work with the council to make it easier and safer for children to walk to Nether Currie primary school, and they are really open to collaboration. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we are serious about tackling road safety issues in rural areas and our towns and cities, we have to work with our school communities to make sure it is absolutely embedded in them?

[Andy MacNae]

Absolutely. This is a hugely important issue and, as in many other areas, we know the solutions. Fantastic work is done by organisations such as Active Travel England that detail the solutions, yet our current or past funding structures make it incredibly difficult. I am campaigning in our constituency for a safe path to a school, yet I find there are essentially no dedicated funding opportunities to meet that very obvious and stark need. This is an absolutely crucial area.

I mentioned active travel, but there is also the question of older people. Residents in social housing along Newchurch Road in Rossendale feel trapped in their estate because there is literally nowhere safe to cross the road near them to reach the amenities they need.

In 2023, there were 1,624 road deaths in Great Britain and 132,977 casualties in total. Pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists still make up a disproportionate share of those killed or seriously injured on UK roads. Department for Transport estimates suggest that the annual cost of reported road collisions is around £43 billion. We cannot afford any of these costs, so what do we do about it? We know the basic principles, and we have touched on them in the debate, with many Members raising them brilliantly.

Many local authorities have adopted strategies based around vision zero, which is an approach originally adopted in countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands. It emphasises that no level of death or serious injury is acceptable on the roads, and it is focused on prevention, protection and post-collision response, coupled with evidence-based targets and robust safety performance indicators. We know that such approaches can be effective and save a great deal of money over the long term, but as we have seen and heard, there seems to be a huge gap between strategy and practical implementation.

If we want to be serious about tackling this issue, we must move towards a truly proactive, community-led approach to road safety that is informed by statistics and not led by them. In such a model, rather than claiming that a centrally held database knows better, we trust the instincts, experiences and wishes of those who use the roads every day. Instead of waiting around until enough people have been hurt to merit an intervention, we proactively identify high-risk areas, and we act.

An excellent example of that approach in action can be seen in the Netherlands. Over the past decade, both Rotterdam and the Hague have been using an algorithm to determine the likelihood of crashes on their roads. The model considers a range of factors, including past crashes, traffic flow, the features of the road, and the presence of on-road parking. From that, it creates a risk rating for each road. Crucially, this rating informs, rather than leads, the local authorities’ decisions. Community experience and input are a key factor in the decision-making process. The ratings are combined with an analysis of the volumes and severity of complaints the authorities receive regarding specific roads. Out of this community-led, data-informed model, the local authorities choose to proactively intervene to protect their citizens.