Safety

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a pictorial reference guide to describing common highway defects - some of which my prove to be a safety hazard to the road network user. Reference to this manual will help to ensure that defect identification is conducted in an accurate and consistent manner. 

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a pictorial reference guide to describing common highway defects - some of which my prove to be a safety hazard to the road network user. Reference to this manual will help to ensure that defect identification is conducted in an accurate and consistent manner. 

Junctions are places of interaction and hence conflict for all road users. Two thirds of all collisions in built up areas occur at junctions, with pedestrians and cyclists being most at risk. The aim of the research is to investigate the attitudes to change, and likely behaviour at junctions, of all types of road users, were a general and unambiguous duty to ‘give way on turning’ to be introduced in the UK context. Q-methodology was used because it is good at capturing and describing divergent views and also consensus.

This manual will benefit a variety of users, but the primary target audiences are engineers, planners, enforcement professionals, public health professionals and educators and other such people who have responsibility to improve pedestrian safety at the local and sub-national levels. Though the application of this manual can be at the national level, the settings envisaged are sub-national geographical

Background: Despite the well-recognised benefit for individuals and communities of increased active travel, cycling remains a minority travel mode in many high income countries. Fear of injury is often cited as a reason. Campaigns to promote cycle helmet wear are alleged to contribute to this. However, there is little information on whether head injuries to cyclists are an important cause of death in road travel fatalities, compared with other road users.

This thesis focuses on the question of how the road environment (road design and network characteristics) affects road safety for cyclists through effects on risk and exposure to risk. In this thesis, the term ‘road design’ is used to denote the location level (e.g. intersection design) while the term ‘network characteristics’ is used in relation to the network level (e.g. the presence of a road hierarchy and road classification). Road design plays a role in cyclists’ crash and injury risk. Network characteristics affect mode and route choice (Heinen et al.

The objective of this research report is to support the development of the forthcoming Cycle Safety Action Plan being prepared by Transport for London to be published in 2014. TfL wished to improve the understanding of the factors which lead to collisions involving fatally injured cyclists and those with life-changing injuries. The research focussed on an in-depth analysis of collisions that occurred between 2007 – 2011 when there were 79 fatal and life threatening collisions involving cyclists of which 53 were available for analysis.

Using 2014 and 2015 data from the UK Near Miss Project, this paper examines the stability of self-report incident rates for cycling near misses across these two years. It further examines the stability of the individual-level predictors of experiencing a near miss, including what influences the scariness of an incident. The paper uses three questions asked for only in 2015, which allow further exploration of factors shaping near miss rates and impacts of incidents.

The numbers of pedal cyclist fatalities in London have varied over the years from 1986 to 2006; averaging 18 per year, the maximum was 33 in 1989 and the minimum was 8 in 2004. There has been a substantial increase in cycling, particularly in central and inner London. The London Travel Report 2007 (Transport for London, 2007a) reported that in 2006 the cycle flows on London’s major roads were almost twice as many as in 2000. During the period January 2001 to December 2006 a total of 108 pedal cyclists were killed in London.

There are fewer road deaths per head of the population in Britain than in almost any other country in the world. With minor variations in international rankings, this has been the case consistently for many years. The most recent data (2015) show that Norway and Sweden both have fewer road deaths per head than Britain while Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands have more.