A final thought is that the current state of regulation and enforcement is not just hurting other modes, but roads themselves. Edmunds adds: “It isn’t just hard on the rail sector, hauliers who abide by the rules are effectively subsidising those who don’t.”
Meanwhile, voices from inside other parts of the road industry are pushing to make themselves heard. An anonymous blogger - ‘bus driver X’ - wrote to the Transport Committee at City Hall in London at the end of January, describing what they called a complacent attitude to safety. One extract from the letter: “BusCos are not asking basic questions about fatigue of their drivers. It’s the driver’s responsibilitiy to turn up fit to work, even if the shifts themselves make drivers unfit. The assumption is that the shifts are not the problem, the drivers are.”
‘Bus driver X’ blogs anonymously for fear of dismissal. In January 2016, London buses joined CIRAS (Confidential Incident Reporting and Analysis System). CIRAS is designed to be independent and comprises representatives from the rail and light rail sectors and other transport modes. The focus is on making all transport safer.
In the future, automation in vehicles will have a growing influence on the safety of our roads. The oft-quoted figure is that 90% of accidents are caused by driver error. In future that may fall, bringing down road fatality statistics. However, to reach that point we will have to go through a mixed economy of newer, more self-thinking vehicles sharing the roads with older cars and lorries that have much less automation. Experts believe this transition period brings potential for complication. How then might we progress towards Professor Allsop’s four-fold reduction in deaths? To find out, let’s promote him temporarily to Secretary of State for Transport. Alterations to the legal blood alcohol limit are on the cards, as is further speed limit enforcement - just two of a range of measures.
“I think I would look for a close analogy between the regulations between road and rail. Everything that happens to a train on the railway is the responsibility of someone in a tightly managed system with high levels of training and discipline. Regulating that situation is different to the road network, where every citizen, every day, is a participant and has their own share of responsibility for what is going on, be it as a pedestrian or a cyclist or a driver.
“What I would do as Secretary of State is reinstate the capability of the local authorities to investigate collisions. It is a dead letter in a number of authorities at the moment. I would restore a modest channel of funding - and I am not talking about hundreds of millions here - and a reporting system. I would rally everyone to contribute, because there are all sorts of stakeholders involved. I would challenge them to say, by 2025, we should be able to reduce casualties to a target. Let’s get together and work on it.”
For the sake of the five people who didn’t make it to the end of the day, surely we ought to heed the rallying call.
