Call to action: towards a practice of inclusive road safety

Road safety in the United Kingdom is of a checkered history. Originating from an age of free motoring and wide-open roads of adventure, its practices and processes have often been preventative to walking and cycling. UK road safety resorts to uttering warning words rather than a combination approach of engineering, education and enforcement, and so regularly blames and restricts the active travel modes. This is to active travel's exclusion and reduction in participation when walking and cycling should be promoted and prioritised in environmentally, socially and economically ailing UK cities. A new approach to road safety will be discussed in this paper, using principles of engineering risk assessment and sustainability. Countries such as the Netherlands have road-safety systems that are more holistic, take into account road design as well as promotion campaigns. By example of three case studies this paper seeks to describe the current practices of UK road safety, then continues to outline how a system of 'Sustainable Safety' can be applied in the United Kingdom. A revised road-safety approach would include engineers and planners becoming more interactive on the political plane and employing wider assessment boundaries to road-safety analyses.