“Following a decade of stagnation in road casualty reduction we cannot expect that doing more of the same will result in anything different for the next decade, so to do something about it we need to enact a step-change in approach to our interventions.”
That’s the assessment of Matt Staton, the author of a paper commissioned by PACTS to assess the local implementation of the Safe System approach.
Matt Staton is head of national road user safety delivery at National Highways, having joined the company in November 2022 from Cambridgeshire County Council.
At Cambridgeshire, Matt spent the last two years as the Vision Zero Partnership delivery manager, coordinating strategic and frontline activity on road safety across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough – the experience on which this article is based.
There are a number of local highway authorities and road safety partnerships around the country developing and adopting strategies based on the Safe System approach – many of which have been covered on this newsfeed.
Matt says that at a strategic level, this is “excellent news for the industry”, with local decision-makers “clearly adopting international best practice” when it comes to road safety.
Matt notes that while the Safe System Approach “provides us with some fundamental principles to implement in our interventions”… “one weakness of the approach is that it does not give us a comprehensive toolkit to use”.
Therefore, he writes, “it is up to practitioners to determine how to implement the principles in practice”.
As for how to do this, the paper outlines the importance of “true collaboration”. This is one area the partnership in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough really focused on, according to Matt, and it involved bringing in external support in the early stages of their strategy development.
Matt also says it is “important to recognise that collaboration extends to the road user too, in establishing a relationship of shared responsibility”.
The paper further looks at the importance of coordination and delivery, with Matt outlining how the partnership “was very conscious of bringing people along on a journey”… “recognising that change can be challenging”.
The paper also touches on the ever-important issue of funding, outlining how the partnership started “lobbying local and national leaders for funding and providing evidence to support or oppose policy change”.
Matt wrote the paper with the agreement of his past and present employers.
Would it not be more realistic to prefix ‘Safe System’ with the word ‘Reasonably’? Only the motorised users of the roads make it ‘safe’ (or not) and day-to-day observation tells me safety on the road is always going to be compromised – no matter what the authorities do.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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