Warwickshire’s reactive approach to road safety
Just a quick thing...
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While trying to get a very local issue with high speed driving in a residential area addressed, Warwickshire County Council has essentially confirmed their reactive approach to road safety – one that relies on incidents occuring before measures may even be considered to address a problem, incidents which could include property damage, injury, serious injury, or even death – incidents that could perhaps be avoided with a proactive approach.
The issue in question relates to intermittent very high speed driving and excessive acceleration along older residential roads which are relatively straight, long enough to afford a driver the chance to reach high speeds, and provide indirect through connections (i.e., they are not dead ends). Throughout 2023 I have collated a count of incidents that I have heard, though the nature of this type of driving means that it’s rarely possible to see the type of vehicle in question, and manual data collection means it cannot be complete. Thus the count is solely a partial log of dates and times when these incidents happen – perhaps not enough for formal police reports. Still, I had hoped that the County Council might at least conduct a formal study of traffic along these roads to formalise my anecdotal data, where proper data collection could operate continuously for an extended period of time (something which I cannot do alone without a technological solution).
The County Council has so far dismissed the figures I had provided, again noting that their data-led approach focuses on collisions of which almost none have been reported in the area over the past five years. This means they don’t take into account general observations, the close calls, or very minor incidents that maybe are not reported to police. This is a significant shortcoming and flies against a Safe System approach to road safety and design – something which the Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership (of which Warwickshire County Council is a part) has adopted.
To further support its inaction, the Council provided aggregate data recorded from connected sat nav devices (presumably including apps such as Google Maps or Apple Maps) which shows average speeds along three sections of a road. However, average speed data is near useless for identifiying intermittent occasional instances of very high speed driving. Such travel might only increase the average by a fairly small amount, assuming that the vehicle occupants are even using sat nav devices or apps at the time. What is needed is a record of maximum driver speed and the occasions these speeds in excess of the speed limit occur, but it’s not clear if this data is available from the sat nav information available to the Council.
Saying that, there was one point of interest in these averages – one records average free-flow speed in excess of 26mph, on a formally 30mph road with various junctions, parked vehicles, and a fairly gentle bend which reduces forward visibility. The thing with averages is that they are calculated from a number of data points both below and above that average. By showing an average of 26mph, by definition there must be drivers travelling at higher speeds. Given how close this is to the formal limit, I’d suggest this would include drivers travelling above 30mph too.
So, while the Council provided this data to support their position that no action is needed here, this data point actually does the opposite. But so far, that simple mathematical fact has been ignored.
Yet even taken alone, an average speed of 26mph shows a problem. It is entirely inappropriate to be travelling at speeds above 20mph on residential streets. Nuneaton has a precident for a 20mph zone in the Stockingford area but this is one of few exceptions, and for most roads in the borough the lowest limit drivers are likely to encounter remains 30mph. This is despite the clear safety benefits that 20mph brings, where lower speeds make it safer for people to walk and wheel or cycle. Slower driving increases driver peripheral awareness, reduces stopping distances, and lowers the impact energy, improving survivability should a collision occur.
There’s no suggestion from the County Council that it will look at installing new 20mph zones, despite this being one of my suggestions to help reduce driving speeds (along with modal filters and raised tables). While by itself this is unlikely to have an effect on tackling the main issue of intermittent very high speed driving, which is already in excess of 30mph, even a small reduction in that high average speed would offer a safety benefit – each 1mph reduction improves survivability in the event of a collision.
Warwickshire does make a very valid point, that it is constrained by budgets and has to target its resources. This is fair, but still that shouldn’t mean taking a reactive position, potentially allowing for multiple incidents which at worse may result in fatalities before taking action to address a problem. At that point it is far too late for the victims and their families, and leaves others in fear of road traffic. This embeds car dependency where people then see travelling by car as the safer option, even for local journeys. It robs young people of their independence where they are not given the freedom to travel alone until later than might otherwise be the case because of the perceived and real dangers from motor traffic and high vehicle speeds.
I should also stress that at this point, I’m not expecting the Council to come along and make major road changes based on what is anecdotal data that I have provided. I have made suggestions at how high speeds could be mitigated, but at this point I’d like to see formal data collection take place that can properly quantify the issue – something that I still hope could happen. When it comes to costs though, I do wonder (and perhaps more knowledgeable people might fill me in here) how much it would cost to zone a residential area as 20mph, or to implement trial modal filters that can be created through temporary infrastructure.
Costs are a problem when looking to the entire county in the short-term – it can’t fix everything at once! But Warwickshire should change it’s position to one of proactively making roads safer, and make a start on long-term work to improve its older residential roads that are not designed to curtail the excesses seen in today’s car use.
There’s no better time to begin than now!
Cover image by Tom Page (CC BY-SA 2.0) – https://flic.kr/p/s9tMmY
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