Road Safety Strategy - What is safety anyway?

The Department for Transport has published a long-awaited UK road safety strategy, the first in over a decade. While the strategy stops short of a zero-deaths vision, it does set out a target to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 65% by 2035. Much of what it proposes is sensible. Measures such as reviewing the drink-driving limit, introducing a six-month learning period for new young drivers, and placing renewed emphasis on enforcement are all long overdue and, if implemented well, could significantly reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads. 

However, I can’t help thinking that whilst the strategy may reduce collisions, will it make roads a more pleasant and welcoming place for vulnerable road users to coexist with drivers? Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect a road safety strategy to fully address perceptions of safety and how people feel using the roads, when its primary purpose is to reduce measurable harm. But for people walking wheeling and cycling, daily experiences of intimidation, close passes and blocked pavements are real and consequential. Ignoring these daily micro-aggressions risks underestimating their impact on whether people feel safe to travel, or indeed travel via certain modes at all. And in doing so, it misses an opportunity to align more closely with the government’s wider active travel ambitions. Road safety and active travel should be complementary, reinforcing one another rather than operating as separate policy strands. 

Familiar measures, familiar limits 

One noticeable thing about the strategy is that although it talks a lot about reviews, pilots and future intentions, very little feels genuinely new. Measures such as graduated driving, tougher drink-driving rules and stronger enforcement have appeared repeatedly in previous consultations and reports. The strategy itself highlights that the so-called “Fatal Four” offences, speeding, drink and drug driving, not wearing seat belts, and mobile phone use, account for a significant proportion of people killed or seriously injured in the UK every day. That doesn’t mean the proposed measures are wrong, but it does raise an important question: if these approaches haven’t significantly changed road culture in the past, why would they do so now on their own? 

For instance, despite around four people being killed by cars on UK roads every day, driving is rarely viewed, either culturally or politically, as a dangerous activity. Instead, road deaths are normalised, minimised or treated as an unfortunate but acceptable by-product of everyday life. As a result, driving is not seen as inherently risky, and the burden of safety quietly shifts onto those most exposed to harm. People walking, wheeling and cycling are expected to adapt their behaviour: don a helmet, adorn themselves with lights and high-visibility clothing, increase their vigilance, and in some cases avoid certain routes or infrastructure altogether because they are considered too dangerous for anything other than car 

The missing conversation: culture and attitudes 

What the strategy largely avoids is the culture of driving and inextricably linked to this is how people who don’t drive are viewed and treated on the roads. In particular, anyone who cycles or uses a scooter regularly will recognise how normalised hostility has become. With users of these modes, routinely framed as irresponsible or illegitimate road users: running red lights, taking up too much space, moving too fast, and yet somehow also too slowly. Close passes, intimidation and aggressive overtakes are rarely about ignorance of the rules; they stem from a belief, conscious or otherwise, that those using active travel are obstacles rather than people. By contrast, everyday rule-breaking by drivers is treated as entirely reasonable. Speeding, but only a tiny bit over the limit, parking on double yellow lines because “I’ll just be a minute” or mounting the pavement for convenience are rarely seen as problems at all, merely the unavoidable realities of driving that everyone is expected to understand. 

The strategy talks a lot about ‘shared responsibility’ and ‘all road users’, but this

oversimplifies what’s really happening. Risk on the roads isn’t shared equally. Motor vehicles are faster, heavier, and more dangerous, while people walking, using wheelchairs, cycling or scooting are the ones who suffer the consequences. When this imbalance isn’t clearly acknowledged, the strategy may reduce collisions on paper, but it’s unlikely to make roads actually feel safer or more welcoming in everyday life. For example, one of the most striking omissions from the strategy is pavement parking, which is barely mentioned at all (despite an announcement a few days after publication that the thorny issue of pavement parking will now be in the hands of individual local authorities– cue a postcode lottery across the UK of how this will be approached!).  But pavement parking regularly forces pedestrians into the road, creates daily stress for those with buggies, and disproportionately affects disabled people and wheelchair users. Although it is often already illegal, it remains widespread because it is culturally normalised and rarely enforced. By failing even to name the problem, the strategy misses an opportunity to send a simple but powerful message: pavements are for people. 

Technology as a future fix? 

The strategy also contains a section on the reliance of technology as part of the long-term safety solution. Certainly, the use of technology via the collection of use of vehicle data to help learn from collisions appears a sensible approach. However, the nod towards automated vehicles leaves me slightly wary. As someone who cycles regularly, one could argue that automation could remove human error, impatience and hostility, including biases towards cyclists. However, even after immersing myself in various literature on how

automated vehicles interact with various road users, I still can’t shake my unease as sharing the road with an automated vehicle whilst riding my bike. Having done Bikeability training many years ago, I was taught about the importance of relying on making eye contact with drivers, road positioning and subtle changes in speed to stay safe. Automated vehicles remove that layer of communication, and in doing so introduce a different kind of uncertainty, which may be statistically safer but ultimately comes back to how safe we feel on the roads. Technology may reduce harm over time, but it still cannot compensate for a hostile road culture. 

A starting point, not a transformation 

Despite my criticism, this strategy is not pointless. It is a step. But it is a cautious, technical one that avoids the hardest questions. If we want roads where vulnerable road users can genuinely coexist with drivers, rather than merely survive them, we will eventually have to confront culture, entitlement and behaviour, not just limits, tests and enforcement plans. Until then, we risk making roads safer on paper while leaving the culture of our streets largely untouched.