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A week of road safety isn’t enough
TRL is proudly supporting Road Safety Week, the UK’s biggest annual road safety campaign, which is organised by the road safety charity Brake. Brake has been working with communities and organisations across the UK since 1995 to make streets safer and to support people bereaved and seriously injured on roads. TRL is a world leader in transport safety and has developed products and expert services that have been proven to analyse, minimise and prevent road collisions. Today, TRL’s Dr Shaun Helman blog reflects on Road Safety Week:
Published on 20 November 2022
Let me explain.
I recently reconnected with an old friend who I’ve been in touch with intermittently over the years. I count them as one of my closest friends, but ours has always been a friendship with no expectation. We sometimes have ‘life stuff’ to get on with, and we have, on occasion, gone for years without seeing each other; whenever we reconnect though, it feels like we last spoke only the day before.
This friend had a serious road collision when they were younger. It was the kind that happens every day. The driver of another vehicle pulled across the path of my friend's vehicle at a junction. My friend sustained serious injuries that required extensive surgery. In the two plus decades since the collision they have, mostly, been in constant pain. There have been some periods during which the pain has been controlled to a relative degree, but it has always been there. They have managed to get on with life, nonetheless. They have raised a family, and have been a fantastic friend to many people, always giving their time to help when they can.
This situation is not at all unusual. This friend of mine is just one of the unlucky hundreds of thousands of people forced to live with a long-term legacy from a momentary event, when all they were trying to do was move from one place to another. Serious injuries like these never go away, and the people who suffer from them think about road safety, in one way or another, every day.
I look forward to a time when I don’t need to be bothered with ‘Road Safety Week’. No other day-to-day activity we all engage in has more capacity to bring such harm than road use. Road safety should be thought about every day by all of us, just as it is by those who suffer the consequences when things go wrong.
So now that Road Safety Week is over, please do me a favour. Have another one. And another. And just keep going with that way of thinking. We won’t get zero harm without it.
As part of TRL’s support for Road Safety Week, we have posted a series of blogs written by our in-house experts, looking across the different themes Brake has identified as encapsulating the overall theme of ‘Safe Roads For All’. TRL’s experts have focused on some specific road users and topics within these themes and have tried to think about how all of this relates to a future in which transport is safe for everyone. The blogs cover active travel (Monday); how we teach children and young people about road safety (Tuesday); speed (Wednesday); road users with differing needs (including a focus on mental health and motorcyclists – Thursday); the future of driving (Friday); and the importance of learning from collisions (Sunday).
Check out TRL’s website for all 12 blogs
Road Safety week ran from 14th to 20th November 2022, to find how out you can support Brake visit Road Safety Week | Brake
About the Author
Shaun is TRL’s Chief Scientist for Behavioural Sciences. He is an applied cognitive and social psychologist with nearly two decades’ experience in road safety, road user behaviour, and human-technology integration. His research focuses on the safety of young and newly qualified drivers, vulnerable road user safety (especially visibility and conspicuity) and work-related road safety. More generally, his research and commentary focus on raising the standards of evaluation and evidence in the transport domain, including research into automated driving technologies, low-emission vehicles, and the emergence of new models of the movement of people and goods such as shared mobility. He has a track record of delivering projects which impact directly on government policy and advice to road users, including many of the changes in the last decade to driver testing and licensing in Great Britain. He has written over 120 journal articles and customer reports since 2002 and has presented at numerous national and international conferences on road safety and other transport issues. He represents TRL at the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, acts as a reviewer for several scientific journals and grant bodies, and is a Trustee of the Road Safety Trust.
