‘Victim-blaming’ claim as TfL told most pedestrians 'don’t look’

Campaigners have warned London Mayor Boris Johnson against addressing a rise in pedestrian fatalities by “blaming the victims”, after research for Transport for London found that half of pedestrians killed failed to look properly. Living Streets made the comments after a summit on pedestrian safety was held at City Hall to influence the Mayor’s first action plan to tackle the issue in the wake of a 33% increase in pedestrian deaths on the roads last year.

The TRL report commissioned by TfL, and published this week, found that, in the police collision files for pedestrian fatalities in the five years to 2010, 37% of collisions were attributed to pedestrian-only factors.

In the study of 198 fatalities in the capital, 96 of the pedestrians were not looking properly and, in 19% of cases, were not crossing the road at a crossing facility. In more than a third of cases the pedestrians were impaired by alcohol.

The police files identified exceeding the speed limit as a cause of the accident in only one eighth of the cases involving a fatality. TRL recommended to TfL that “improved pedestrian awareness of other road users” was the “countermeasure” recorded by the police as being most likely to prevent further deaths, followed by automated emergency brake systems.

Introducing 20mph speed limits was recorded by the police in only two of the 198 deaths as something that would have preventing them.

In sharp contrast, the summit, chaired by London Assembly member Val Shawcross, focused on how to make the road environment more forgiving for pedestrians making mistakes, according to Living Streets.

Speaking at the summit after her authority agreed to introduce 20mph limits on every road it controls, Islington Council Councillor Catherine West urged TfL and Isabel Dedring, the Mayor’s deputy for transport, to follow suit. She wants TfL to implement 20mph limits on streets such as the A1 Holloway Road.

Islington’s decision came despite objections by the police and TfL and was welcomed as “ground-breaking” by Living Streets because it was “the most effective measure to avoid needless deaths”.

Tom Platt, Living Streets’ London co-ordinator, told LTT after the summit: “There’s a shift in thinking that we need to make roads more forgiving. Pedestrians run across roads because crossings are in the wrong place and they don’t give you enough time. If there’s then an accident, that’d be recorded as inappropriate pedestrian behaviour.”

He said that the TRL report was wrong to pinpoint pedestrian education as the highest priority measure, particularly given the ageing population. The TRL report identified that a disproportionate number (42%) of the pedestrian fatalities in the five years to 2010 were aged 60 or over, and that pedestrian-only contributory factors were lower for this group, at 25%.

The fact that the Mayor’s roads taskforce was looking at the typology of roads by their ‘place’ as well as movement function was encouraging, Platt said. “The North Circular mainly has a movement function. The Holloway Road is not just the A1, but a residential and shopping street.”

TfL this week launches its latest campaign to reduce the number of teenage casualties. Ben Plowden, TfL surface transport’s director of planning, said: “With the rise of mobile phones and MP3 players, now more than ever TfL urges teenagers to not get distracted on the road.”