Post-pandemic road safety: How can we understand what’s changed on our roads?
- Click here to register for this live keynote presentation, which takes place at 10.00 - 11.00 on Wednesday 3 November
The last 18 months have seen a rollercoaster of changes in road use by different transport modes. With traffic levels allegedly back to ‘normal’, we will explore the evidence available on what the ‘new normal’ is and how behaviours may have changed.
This session will review the data available from a number of sources to help understand what changes took place and what might be happening now, including:
How are people using the roads?
Access to historical data is critical to aid understanding of change, but authorities are faced with challenges where this data has not been collected via automated traffic counters. Using vehicle probe data from GPS tracks using passive tracking and navigation equipment can offer authorities access to a ‘time machine’ to review road use an behaviour pre- and post-pandemic. There was a well-publicised boom in cycling and walking during the first lockdown but what do more recent observations tell us about potential long-term use of the roads?
Road user behaviour
There were many well-publicised high-speed offences detected during the first lockdown but was this just a few reckless motorists or indicative of a wider trend? How did this change between different vehicle types and what data do we know about more recent patterns? This session will look at national data to try and get a handle on what’s happening now and how authorities can identify and track high-speed, low-compliance locations.
Road casualty risk
Understanding how people are travelling and their speed choice is important, as is the knock-on effects in terms of road user casualties. What does the available data tell us and what more do we need to understand? How can we calculate risk for populations and balance this with the overwhelming health benefits of active travel? Has the recent rise in e-scooter use seen a jump in casualties?
Richard Owen, CEO, Agilysis
Richard Owen is an established international expert in the field of road safety and has extensive experience in assisting organisations turn road safety policy into practise.
In over 16 years’ experience of collecting, analysing, visualising, and evaluating road safety data he has worked with local authorities, police forces, national governments and research organisations. He has been responsible for the creation of bespoke practitioner workshops covering safe system implementation, evaluating road safety interventions and measuring risk on roads.
He is a member of several road safety panels working with PACTS, CIHT and the International Transport Forum at the OECD. He regularly presents at conferences across the globe, helping to share much of the excellent work carried out by UK road safety organisations.