Road Safety

More Than Bad Behaviour: Rethinking America's Road Safety Problem

The US is an outlier amongst rich countries when it comes to road safety, with a much higher rate of killed and serious injuries. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), part of the US Department of Transportation, has released its Pathways to Safer Streets to "drastically reduce injuries and fatalities".

Key Takeaways

The approach relies on 8 "core pathways":

1. Reengage Law Enforcement - revitalize partnerships with law enforcement to increase traffic enforcement, restoring the “deterrence effect” that has weakened since the pandemic.
2. Reduce Excessive Speeding - promote the smart use of automated technology to augment traditional law enforcement.
3. Prevent Impaired Driving - focus on support for innovative approaches to increased prosecution, specialized legal support, and implementation of technologies that help reduce impaired driving recidivism.
4. Leverage State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) - provide SHSOs with an AI-powered State Program Hub that offers 24/7 access to real-time data insights by visualizing trends and hotspots, helping identify priority safety issues and tailored countermeasures to support informed decision making.
5. Expand Prehospital Blood Transfusion Programs - funding the expansion of prehospital blood transfusion programs across the country.
6. Mobilize a National Partnership Strategy - strategically partner with agencies and organizations with national, state, and local audiences to amplify the agency’s messaging and promote connections with SHSOs. This will move public education beyond traditional media to community-level engagement.
7. Increase Occupant Protection Use - funding nighttime enforcement operations during hours when belt use typically drops.
8. Reduce Distracted Driving - research innovative ways to identify the full scope of distracted driving and reflect how modern drivers use in-vehicle and other technology on the road.

Comment

The problem with NHTSA's approach is stated in the first line of its website: "Despite hard-won progress, the roadway safety crisis is still a significant behavioural problem in the United States."

Road safety is far more than just a behavioural problem. The design of our entire transport system impacts road safety - are speed limits too high, do we have high exposure to more dangerous modes, do we provide safe infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, do we ensure that vehicles are safe not just for the occupants but the people they crash into?

I suspect that NHTSA knows this is inadequate, which is why there are no targets for their approach.

How much can we expect this plan to reduce the US's poor safety record? We have no idea.

What Next?

Do you have a road safety plan with a clear action plan that you are confident will deliver on clear targets?

Parking

Time to Pull the Parking Lever

Parking is a powerful but often underused lever for achieving mode shift in transport systems towards more efficient and sustainable modes. Transform Scotland, a national alliance for sustainable transport in Scotland, has produced a report titled "Ahead of the Kerb, How to tackle the hidden costs of parking."

Key Takeaways

• The report begins by outlining the problems parking causes, including health and environmental issues, and unfairness.
• The report highlights the problems of SUVs: they take up more space, increase road damage, create unfair costs, and make streets less safe for pedestrians and cyclists.
• The report looks at five case studies, looking at best practice parking policies covering:
  • Pavement parking bans
  • Kerbside management
  • Parking charges by vehicle footprint
  • Parking charges by weight
  • Workplace parking levy
• The report also discussed complementary policy measures:
  • Permits based on emissions.
  • Permit limits.
  • Removal of parking minimums
  • Levies on out-of-town parking spaces.
  • Large vehicle levy.
• The report looked at the parking policies of four Scottish cities and assessed them against:
  • Principles and vision.
  • Permit parking.
  • Short-stay parking.
  • Workplace parking levy.
• Recommendations at the local level:
  • Enforce the pavement parking ban
  • Adopt standalone parking plans
  • Engage major employers on workplace parking
  • Introduce weight-based parking charges
  • Ban SUV advertising
• Recommendations for the Scottish Government:
  • Equip Local Authorities to make the case for reform
  • Advocate for a levy on bigger cars from the UK Government
  • Explore the feasibility of banning SUVs in city centres

Comment

Pulling the parking reform lever would benefit many transport systems. However, it is an emotionally charged policy area, and as a result, many politicians steer clear of making too many changes.

Whilst this paper is good on what to do, we need to do more to support decision-makers on how to undertake parking reform to make it easier to achieve.

The Transport Reform Network has a Parking working group that I hope will pull together resources to support achieving parking reform. If you want to get involved, you can find out more here.

What Next?

Do you have a plan for reforming parking policy?

Policy

Gridlock on the Numbers: How Congestion Studies Mislead Transport Policy

Several organisations regularly produce cost-of-congestion reports that regularly appear in mainstream media and lead to calls for more spending on roads to benefit motor vehicles. Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has produced a report on congestion costing techniques.

Key Takeaways

• The report evaluates the methodologies used in congestion cost studies, including:
  • The Urban Mobility Report (UMR)
  • The INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard (GTS)
  • The TomTom Traffic Index,
  • The Cost of Congestion to the Trucking Industry,
  • Congestion costing section of the European Commission’s Handbook on External Costs of Transport.
• Most congestion cost studies fail to reflect best practices:
  • They use freeflow rather than legal and efficient baseline speeds.
  • Fail to account for the tendency of traffic apps to oversample delay.
  • Significantly overestimate the amount of travel that experiences significant congestion.
  • Overvalues delay compared with motorists’ actual willingness to pay.
  • Ignores the additional fuel, emission and crash costs caused by high traffic speeds

• Much of their estimated congestion costs consists of speed compliance: traffic speeds declining to legal limits.
• Much of the estimated year-to-year growth in congestion costs reflects increased off-peak traffic speeds rather than declines in peak period speeds.
• The studies’ congestion cost estimates represent upper-bound values that are much higher than estimates based on more realistic assumptions.
• The “realistic” estimates reflect the analysis methods recommended by many experts, which indicate that delay cost estimates are typically 4-8 times higher than deadweight loss cost estimates.
• These studies lack comprehensive literature reviews, fail to make analysis transparent, do not discuss potential omissions and biases, and lack independent peer review.

Comment

One significant problem with estimates of congestion is that they measure delays to motor vehicles, not people. If more people make quicker bus or train journeys, this is not necessarily reflected in the data, even though fewer people are experiencing congestion.

Of course, we also need to consider the movement of goods. However, we should not be surprised that when we make things free at the point of use, like roads, we end up with queues.

Any serious attempt to reduce congestion needs to start by tackling the subsidy of roads through some form of road pricing (and parking charges), rather than just a congestion charge in city centres. which, although better than nothing, is far from a perfect solution.

What Next?

Do you have a realistic strategy for the more efficient movement of people and goods?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​'Hard to break the habit': Why free public transport isn't enough to shift from cars - A report from Australia looking into why free public transport is not getting people out of their cars.
• ​The US Spends More Time and Money Building Transit Than Most Countries. Inefficient Community Engagement May Help Explain Why. - A blog suggesting ways of improving community engagement in US transit projects.
• ​India has splurged billions on metro trains. But where are the commuters? - A report from the BBC looking at why India's new metro trains are underperforming.

Podcast

The History of Road Safety

The latest Transport Leaders podcast is the first part of a series on road safety. The first episode discusses the history of road safety and what it means for today's challenges.

You can listen here​

You can watch here​

Innovation

Ghost Bus Dashboard

Ghost buses, a bus that appears on real-time tracking systems or information boards but fails to arrive as scheduled, are a significant pain for users.

​This ghost bus dashboard and reporting tool was built by someone whilst waiting for the next bus after a ghost bus failed to show up.

Tool

Cycling Investments

​This tool, produced by the World Bank and ITDP, is a cost-benefit analysis tool designed to help decision-makers evaluate investments in cycling infrastructure.