Lower speed limits and more cameras in Vision Zero charter

Lower limits and more speed cameras lie at the heart of a new environmental road safety campaign that aims to build on the momentum of the 20’s Plenty for Us campaign for 20mph speed limits.

Vision Zero UK’s headline goal is the elimination of deaths from road accidents. The campaign aims to fuse road safety and environmental policy and rejects measures such as the building of bypasses, or removing objects such as trees from the roadside, which can add to the severity of accidents if struck by a vehicle. 

The campaign’s founders are two prominent green transport campaigners: John Whitelegg, a former Green party councillor on Lancashire County Council, geography academic, and sustainable transport consultant; and Anna Semlyen,  campaign manager of 20’s Plenty for Us, author of the book Cutting your car use, and a former Labour councillor in York.

“We have ‘Vision Zero’ already in aviation, the railways and health and safety at work, so why not on roads?” Whitelegg told LTT.

He said the campaign shared the same core commitment to eliminating road death as Sweden, which pioneered the Vision Zero concept in 1997. But the Swedish and UK approaches to achieving zero deaths needed to be different. 

“Sweden are dead-keen on removing trees and bolders from the roadside, and they’re dead-keen on high-viz [for vulnerable road users] and cycle helmets.” The country had also introduced engineering measures such as central crash barriers on inter-urban roads.

“These are superficial distractions that do not fundamentally eliminate fear and danger,” said Whitelegg. “Road safety has to be an ethical policy.”

A statement by the campaign group says: “The UK version of Vision Zero is environmental and does not recommend bypasses, compulsory cycle helmet wearing or that trees are removed [from the roadside]. It is not victim-blaming and will not promote high-viz for the vulnerable, pedestrian guardrails, or anything that might not lead to overall motorised traffic reduction.”

Whitelegg this week supplied LTT with the newly completed Vision Zero UK charter, which local authorities will be encouraged to sign (see panel). 

It states: “Vision Zero is a total commitment to achieving zero with direct links to reducing health damaging air pollution, reducing carbon emissions in line with national climate change targets and stripping out fear and danger in the road traffic environment to produce a significant increase in walking and cycling.” 

In a launch statement, VZUK said that, to sign up to the charter, authorities “must at least agree to speed reductions of a default 20mph for built-up areas, to review and lower speed limits on other roads, speed enforcement with automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras, crash investigation learning and to intermediate targets, monitoring and more.” 

The campaign will adopt the same operating model as 20’s Plenty for Us.  “Local authority councillors are our key targets to influence,” says the Vision Zero UK website. “Because they listen to local residents, we aim to recruit volunteers across the UK to form local Vision Zero UK branches.”  

Paul Watters, the AA’s head of roads policy, this week questioned the campaign’s focus. “We all want Vision Zero,” he said, but added: “Interurban roads are still the backbone of the economy. If you screw everything down you can probably achieve it [zero deaths] but would you make life tolerable? Probably not.

“We’re not against route action – such as SPECS [average speed cameras] where it’s an identifiable problem but don’t blitz them everywhere because people will get fed up with them.”

Asked what the campaign’s remedies for rural roads were, Whitelegg told LTT they could include:

• reduced speed limits controlled by ANPR cameras, with fines related to the degree of speeding and the wealth of the speeder (as in Switzerland)

• a ‘step-down’ strategy so that as drivers approach a village or small town there will be very clear step downs (60-50-40-30-20mph), with vehicles limited to 20mph before entering an area of pedestrian activity

• footpaths and cycle paths by the side of any rural road where there is an expectation of pedestrian activity. “This will be implemented where necessary by compulsory purchase of strips of land adjacent to the road,” he said. “Total safe systems and danger reduction take priority over land ownerships issues.”

Whitelegg said junctions in urban and village settings should also have total red traffic signal phases. “Pedestrians must not be put in the position of making several different crossings with different traffic light phases because the current system is biased in favour of the vehicles and does not recognise the importance of total safe systems.”

The Vision Zero UK website lists supporters as the academic Danny Dorling, transport and health specialist Adrian Davis, and 20’s Plenty founder Rod King. Anna Semlyen told LTT that membership charity the Urban Design Group was also supporting the campaign. 

Branches have been set up in London, the London Borough of Merton, the West Midlands and Manchester.

The launch conference was sponsored by Vysionics, which manufactures ANPR-based average speed cameras.

Whitelegg ran the green transport consultancy Eco-Logica until 2013, when he closed it down to  concentrate on book-writing, and researching what he calls the “three zeros” – zero carbon, zero road deaths, and zero air pollution. 

Road Safety - Vision Zero charter measures