The Active Travel Cafe for 11 June 2024, with presentations on data to solve the school run traffic wall, and Ranty Highwayman on the development of Vision Zero and designing to increase safety.
00:00 News roundup from around the country.
07:09 Nicola Pastore introduces “Solve the School Run” a data dashboard highlighting primary school travel insights and use of data in supporting sustainable trips to school.
44:02 Mark Philpott on the (Swedish) history of Vision Zero – reducing danger and designing safe systems.
so tonight’s lineup on the active travel Cafe we are really delighted to have Nicola Pastor who’s going to share her new school travel dashboard um created by solve the school run and we also have our regular runy Highway Man slot on The Good the Bad and the interesting and this week Mark is going to talk to us about the origins of vision zero so two really great talks uh before that we will have a few minutes to uh talk about news around the country so if anything has happened where you live and you’d like to share we would love to hear from you or if there’s any sort of information you want to share um uh or anything kind of locally or nationally that you’d like to discuss please put your hand up do I have anyone with news this week Amy hi yeah thanks um I just want to say next week the National Police Chief’s Council working group on road crime reporting that’s bike cam reporting and dash cam reporting is meeting and action Vision zero has a slot um at the meeting to present the views of cycle campaigners and um um Walkers and Tim wall is leading on this for us Tim wall from push bikes but he’s not here not able to be here tonight so he asked me to speak um so if anyone here on the meeting is interested was engaged in bite cam reporting I’ll put my um email address in the chat we’re just trying to get common calls agreed um by the cycle and and walking organizations or campaigners and trying to make sure that it’s just not being determined by the police but that they hear from the community thank you thank you Amy yeah that would be great if you could put that in the chat for people that’s fantastic rth do you have a question or do you have a something to share sorry if I could follow that up with Amy because my partner was Da a couple of weeks ago and we were told to pull in the form sorry police were very proactive bya Twitter but the form is still so so complicated because it keeps talking about Vehicles not about the person on the bike so even though it was an interaction between someone cycling and a car and the form still is not really good enough to make people feel like they could be bothered and quite honestly we lost the will to live to do that because he wasn’t injured but you know the guy his car wasn’t taxed and uh it’s a criminal offense so the form really has got to be simpler thank you thank you Ruth does anyone else have anything to share Andy do you want to come in Andy no sorry yes sorry you know I’m I’m muted I have now I was just say the the cycle rally in York in in a couple weeks time um is sort of something that people come to from all over the country um and the the local cycle campaign is having a stall and and trying to get local people to attend it a bit more and and sort of make that link just thought people would be interested in in that um and we have a bit of news from New York like everywhere else I suppose is the the general election means that the transport strategy which was about to be um progressed this month has been put off for another month um because of it being politically contentious but hopefully we will have um something that a lot of people will be interested in um by July thank you Andy H of you got your hand up I can’t see you there H we got you yeah sorry sorry oh no we’ve got that feedback we can’t you you got me now it’s all right right yeah what happened is it’s easier for me to come on on the mobile device but keep the screen up yes I was a bit late coming in um yeah I don’t know couple of things it’s did anybody pick up on this guy that got sentenced to six years in Birmingham for killing a 5-year-old on um a food delivery run um B basically it it’s um we’re having a big plague of it in Glasgow I think it’s going in Manchester as well that um they’re taking modified eapcs and uh pseudo eapcs they’re sort of fat 20inch tires which certainly don’t have pedling they’ve got throttles um and they’re doing food deliveries and uh there’ve been big purges Manchester and glasgo been seizing them quite regularly um and in Scotland we have SE 97 of the road Scotland act which means we can license the delivery companies of Street trading at the moment the delivery companies walk away from it because they say oh they’re gig economies they’re not our employers employees and that’s what happened with um the Domino’s Pizza 30 years ago the guy seriously injured somebody getting the food to the place in 30 minutes and uh Domino’s resisted and tried to get away from it but they actually got made liable and stung for $80 million but nobody’s actually going after just eat deliveroo and people like that for being licensed so they know who their Riders are check that their Riders are using legal bikes and uh don’t have their Riders racing to deliver within 30 minutes so I don’t know whether anybody’s getting that sort of feedback elsewhere in the country yeah does anybody else want to offer anything on that I mean we’ve talked about it I think a few times now and I think it is kind of is a huge problem and really for the people riding those bikes um you know more than anyone probably um and we are hoping to have somebody to come and talk a bit about about it at some point so um yeah if anybody knows anyone who they know is doing work in this area then we’d be great to hear um do we have anybody else with any news because if we don’t I think we’ll move on to our speakers because we’ve got a lot to C cover tonight thank you very much and so I am delighted to uh to present Nicola Pastor tonight uh Nicola do you want to share your screen yes um who’s GNA talk us through um a new dashboard to help us solve the school run hi everyone can you all hear me yep that’s all great and can you see my screen yeah excellent um so I umum so hello there I’m Nicola pastor and um I’m from solve the school run I’m co-founder of the um group um and I’m going to take you through a little bit around who we are um and then um as Sally said um just introduce our school travel dashboard and the use case for it um so we are a community organization we’re based in southeast London in Dage um and we are campaigning for more sustainable School run we are members of sort of parents of of all different types of schools so that might be from a sort of local catchment Primary School to a independent Secondary School um and we um our vision is of course to have a safe clean and green School run for every child so not not that ambitious and we um we ultimately really want to just reduce School run traffic um we are very active in Doge and we’ve taken because there are so many schools here we’ve taken a really sort of datal approach in terms of understanding how many peoples are in the area and how far they’re traveling and that has been really helpful for us in figuring out where to focus our efforts and what SS of of solutions and school run alter sustainable alternatives to campaign for um and so we kind we the reason how why we developed our dashboard is to enable that approach kind of more widely for other campaign groups as well and by pulling that data together for other areas um I’m just going to touch a little bit on our local picture because it does give context as to sort of um why why the data and and Analysis is so useful for us so this is um West Doge and Southeast London in this very small area here you can see it’s kind of you know this is 1.5 miles across road so it’s a very concentrated area have a huge number of schools the blue ones are kind of catchment schools where peoples attend directly from their media area around them and the yellow ones are non- catchment schools where um pups can come to the school living anywhere in London so peoples travel sort of more like two or three miles or longer in many cases to attend them um and as a result of all that you can sort of see that almost every journey to school wherever you look is really fraud I’m sure that’s very similar to any any um what a school run picture looks like in many parts of the country but you’ve got uh children walking to this primary school here again sort of around 0 this is a local catchment school so about 90% of children are walking or cycling to school here because they’re coming from a very a small area but they’re doing so mid like a wall of school run traffic which is sort of headed to all the other schools in the area you’ve kind of got Secondary School pupil their parents have actually kind of let them cycle to school but they’re doing so in really dangerous conditions down here then you’ve got a mom on with a cargo bite she’s trying to do the right thing but she’s battling these massive School coaches so it’s it’s it’s a very um huge number of schools lots of school traffic and what we have been sort of active in the area in lots of different guises for about five years or since my son started sort of primary school I’ve been active in the area and in terms of obviously fundamentally we’re always campaigning for safe Roots as such a big part of enabling active travel but in terms of behavior change you were thinking oh you know this is a little bit about what we talking about earlier s like we started saying oh let’s do a walking bus to his our local primary school you know let’s let’s do that but when we stepped back and looked at all of this area we realized actually kind of doing a walking line to a school here that already has a 90% active travel rate is not really the best use of our time you know looking at how a lot of these children where D who comeing two or miles and the driving rates more like 50% and there’s a huge number of children you know coming to these schools that’s going to be a better use of our time in terms of trying to impact modal shift and reduce School run traffic um so that was our our local picture which and when we Ste back from it we realized we’ve really benefited from diving into the data in terms of pupil numbers and how far they’re traveling and what their sort of lightly driving rates are in our local area um and that you know it may be really useful for other groups as well too to have for their areas so we came up with um the concept of build a data model on it um and uh convert that into into a school travel dashboard and what I’m going to do now is just take you through um some of the steps behind the model and then the kind of use case for the model and mainly on this call I’m going to focus on the use case because the data is London specific so um I’m not going to delve too much into what it’s actually saying about London just more around why we built it and how it can be used for campaign grps because the idea is also to show if this is useful then you know this is the sort of data we need n nationally to really try and make dents in school run driving rates so we started off dissecting the national travel survey uh for London so we had a picture nationally but um we needed to unpick that um with the tables behind the data um or sorry the the underlying tables to look at the London level and we saw that primary peoples the driving rate is about 28% in London and it’s 10% for secondary schools um so it’s much higher at Primary School level excuse me and um and that’s obviously because as we know primary peoples are accompanied by their parents to school for the most part so um parents are going to sort of be the ones making that decision in terms of how their child gets there they’re also younger so it’s harder for them to take active travel to school and versus secondary peoples and this is the same for the national picture in terms of the fact the trend of primary school driving rates are much higher than secondary schools so we zoned in on um primary primary pupils London primary pupils and the second thing we did was try to understand how distance impacts um these people Journeys in London so again we I sort of uh went into the underlying sort of tables in the National travel survey to um understand what the driving rates were in London for different distances from school so for primary pupil in London under one mile um around 7% of them will be driven but when you get to 1 to two miles that’s 65% of peoples um on average are driven to school so distance that the child is traveling obviously just has this huge impact in in in um what mode they they then take to get to school um and that is this trend again is the same nationally but the numbers are a bit higher so sort of um under a mile I think nationally it’s more about 18% or 15% roughly of children are driven to school and sort of one to two miles it’s about 78% um so so once we dissected this then in terms of how we built our model um we then for each London primary school we categorized pupils into these travel distances so how how many peoples each School were traveling under a m school and how many were traveling one to two miles um and and two to five miles although that is rarer for for London for peoples to be in that range but it it does happen um and then once we had those numbers we could then um apply uh the average driving rates in London to sort of get a modeled uh driving rate and a modeled um made of Transport so for example if you had a school with just 100 people and they all lived under a mile your driving rate would be 7% for that school if you have a school with 200 peoples and 100 live under a mile and 100 live between one to two miles you’re going to have seven of the first 100 being driven and 65 of the second hundred being driven so you’ve got more like kind of 70 pupils out of 200 being driven which equates to a sort of 35% driving rate um so so that was the sort theoretical approach we decided we would take to building out a data model for London primary schools um and what what we then did was put that together into our London primary people’s School travel dashboard which is here um and I will dive into the live version in a second um and the use case behind it is to enable communities to better understand their local school travel patterns and sort of take the right action for their for their area um so it’s looking at how far peoples travel to their schools and it’s modeling how they’re most likely to making those Journeys it can be looked at from a school a ward a burrow a school type or AC cross London level um and so the sorts of groups that we hate people will benefit from at are groups just like ourselves it might be parent groups Community groups like really trying to encourage active travel could be counselors who need support and want to understand an area when they’re putting in local active ch measures um could be independent school parents who just really want a school bus and they’re trying to prove that why it’s needed to their schools um so those are the sorts of use cases that we envisage is being helpful for um and what it allows you to do or enables you to do sorry is um quantify how many people are already walking or cycling to school to sort of highlight the lack of safe and healthy streets available to them because you know even though we know school driving is a problem a huge number of peoples in fact the majority of people do already travel sustainably to school um and they don’t have particularly healthy or safe Journeys um to better understand your local school run Dynamics including which Wards or schools or areas might have the highest model driving rates again for us that was really powerful because we were just looking in the wrong direction we were focusing on sort of the school my children were at when really there were much bigger problems elsewhere um and thirdly sort of to get a sense of the distances people are being driven so that you can think about what other sustainable travel Solutions might be needed in addition to say froods to school you know if you have schools where 50% of you know Prim of primary peoples live over two miles from school then you definitely need safe Roots but you might also need school you know a school bus and cargo bikes and so on um the only other uh points to add here are that our data adviser on the project was Anna Gman who um was the data lead behind the propensity to cycle tool which I’m sure many of you are familiar with um and within our model um we we had to travel distance data we included Independent Schools because they are a really big um part of the picture well they are an important part of the picture um but because we there isn’t any public information available on their catchment areas or where their people live so we had to um put in an estimate for that um which we’ve done and the detail of that is is all in the model um so what I’m going to attempt to do now is just quickly dive into the the live site so that um you just to take a quick look at um of how you can sort of interact with the data so just bear with me while I get that up um so can I’m am I still sharing my screen can you see a yeah website with a dashboard on it yeah brilliant um so the data dashboard is available on our on our website um and again I’m I’m going to not necessarily touch on the London specific findings within it um but more just the use case of how it can be useful for Community groups because um yeah as I was saying a big part of what we want to do is to push for better data and better insights on Source travel so that um and better measurement of it so that um you know we can understand what’s working and and and continue to make progress um and and do and have that on a more like national scale and more sort of systematic scale because there’s so little data in the space I think um and we think that we found when we uh when we started looking at it um so this is the I’m just going to go through the sort of the front um dashboard because there’s a lot of information here but this overview is showing you here those um oh with me a second these showing you the categories with distance categories so how many peoples are living under a mile one to two miles and over two miles um so this is for all of London right now um and here you can dissect the data into different ways in terms of inner outter London or burough Ward School type and school name um so you’ve got about kind of 560,000 peoples living in London sorry you’ve got about 560,000 pups traveling under a mile to their primary schools in London and um in terms of how they travel again we we’ve used that 7% to suggest that okay about 40,000 of them are likely to be driven to their school and the remainder 520,000 are walk or traveling sustainably you’ve then got a much smaller number um 150,000 living um between one sorry traveling between one and two miles to their school but because 6 5% of them are driven actually um that’s about 100,000 people’s driven to school so it’s more than it’s more in total than than those um driven who living under a m and likewise here for under two miles for over two miles um and um here we’ve then got that modeled percentage of people’s driven to school this is for all of London primary schools that’s about 25% and again that comes from the maths behind using these percentages to these pupil numbers um and on this side we’ve just kind of got you know very high level recommended sustainable travel Solutions that’s just outlining you know if you’re living under a mile it is reasonable to assume that all kind of primary peoples can walk or cycle those distances and they you know so and likewise one to two miles lots of those Journeys can also be walked or cited by pupils and that’s where you need safe roots and everything that they goes with that but it is also just bringing in the fact that where you you know 65% of of people are not um walking or cycling right now in that distance range and so thinking about cargo bikes and school buses and other Solutions obviously for further um slightly longer School runs and we think are important in addition to people’s walking and cycling themselves um one uh quick um SC and dice I will show you because it’s an important Dynamic um is understanding the catchment and the non- catchment school um split so one of the filters here we’ve got is catchment and non-catch school type and we’ve divided that into catchment and non- catchment schools and uh if you’re a catchment school that means that um people’s live you know in the in close proximity to their school because their schools selecting them based on where they live and so you can see that you’ve got the vast majority of peoples living under a mile from school um with a small number small percentage one to two miles non and therefore your more adult percentage of children driven to school is 20% non catchment which here kind of we’ve um included Independent Schools and Faith schools so schools which start to bring in a different type of admission process other than how close peoples are living to their school have a um much more dispersed uh people um their pupils are much more dispersed and so there’s a much higher number of peoples in these buckets living one to two miles and over two miles away from their school um and as a result you’ve got the kind of modeled percentage of P’s driven to school is 36% um so so that is just an important Dynamic to sort of that we brought out in this um and one of the use cases that I’ll Just sh you from my area is that you can go in to your ward so I’m going to go into Lamberth um and I’m going to pick my ward which is um West DED and it’s going to update all the data for um my particular area where we have about 30% of people’s driven to school um and then you can kind of go in and see the different schools in the area and the school Nam so there’s two schools here and you can kind of um go and see the trends for each one so Oakfield Prep School it has lot it’s it doesn’t um it’s it’s an independent school um it has lots of children um sort of coming from over two miles away and one sort of one to two miles away um and then the and the B is quite um small in total number numbers there’s about 300 sort of total pupils and then you’ve got another um primary school in the area which is actually catchment school where most of those children are sort of living um under a mile um sort of traveling under a mile um and and traveling sustainably so it’s just providing lots of different detail on your area around the schools and the and and rough and how children are traveling I’m not going to go into all of these um tabs because of time but another um you can sort of have a look by B so you can sort of compare um how your particular area is this is the sort of percentage of children traveling over a mile to school um and you can compare that to other borrowers so um you know for example here in London you’ve got an area like Tower hamlets where like 19% of children um are traveling one mile and over to their school so the lighter green is showing um a lower percentage of children traveling to school um so really most people in town hamlets living very near their school and that compares to somewhere like Kensington and Chelsea where they have um also in London so but but they have a lot more independent schools so you therefore would expect that they have you know you know more like 50% of children traveling over them after their school so the sorts of school run you know the sorts of school travel that you might need for those two different areas could look quite different um in terms of of of enabling active travel and reducing School run car trips um you can have a look in by Ward um and this is useful because school run car trips of course don’t just come into your ward they might be accessing an area nearby you um and so you can look at your um you can look at this of how many the percentage of children traveling over a mile not just for your ward but you can look around you it’ll sorry it’s a bit blurry now but it will hopefully become clearer in just a second um you can sort of understand okay um I’m in West Solage down here and I you know right so so my area is quite dark blue so there’s a quite High number of children um so it’s clear now here I am in West D sort of about 38% of children are traveling over a mile to their school um in my ward but next to me you’ve got much higher numbers ch um much higher percentage of children doing that so then you can um um kind of Del delve into surrounding boards or surrounding areas to um again kind of understand so that was Dage Village um what the Dynamics are there and their schools will come up list of schools and kind of how many children how many people are traveling under a mile um and over a mile and then this last um this last uh tab displays a breakdown of pupil numbers by School typee in a given area as well as a modeled percent people numbers so model people numbers given to school by school type um so you know just at a top London level um you’ve got around 71% of primary schools in London are catchment primary schools um and you’ve got for example 10% of people numbers in London are um Independent School pups but when you compare that to the percentage of children driven to school um it’s 50% of pups 71% becomes 50% 57% of pups driven to school are driven to catchment schools and 20% of children driven to school are from Independent Schools because they’re traveling further distances um and again you can dissect that um at different levels so um that was a Whistle Stop tour of our um dashboard um and I’m just going to PO back to our um um slide pack now you know again as I was saying we really want people in London to obviously be able to use the data and and benefit from it and we also want to build a case for better data just Nationwide on the school run um so a couple of well three things actually on um if you um of how you could help if you wanted to is to obviously check out our data dashboard that we’ve gone through um and sign up to our newsletter um also to um we should have if you’re in London we should have some um kind of assets and case studies um Coming online soon on how groups are using data to kind of further their campaigns for better safe roots to school and better um School travel uh but sustainable School travel um the second point is looking out for our general election Manifesto which we’re very small group um we’re bit behind us hopefully coming out in the next couple of days but it does call for for one of the points that calls for is better National School Run Travel data and we’re particularly asking for the um School census the question in this there was a question in the school census which every school answered that um was how basically how children are traveling to school when it was at the child level um and that was dropped in 2011 so we haven’t really had any Nationwide sort of systematic data on how children are traveling since then um and we just think to really make in school run driving like we have to be able to track and measure this um um you know on a national level so that’s one of the uh items it’s calling for and then the third one is just another plug for the school run cruncher which um Leo from possible I know um spoke about earlier but um you know we think that school run traffic it does have a really disproportionate impact school run cets have such an disproportionate impact um on a local area because they’re all happening at the same time so they push over capacity really quickly um and that’s why it can have such devastating effects on areas and if we can try and prove that link the more we can prove that link obviously the more action we can drive to um trying to solve the school run so um yeah just another reminder to um check out the school run cruncher and enter local R routes near you um if you’ve got the time so that is um yeah that is me wrapping up thank you so much for list listening thank you very much Nicola that was really fantastic um got a few questions I think in the chat if anybody has um has a question that they want to ask in person please put hand up um but I was going to start by so so you’re you’re talking about putting a case um together for more data and and I wondered whether I mean you might not know much about this but I just suppose I was thinking about how that maps on to Newcastle where I am that we we’ve have it I wonder whether we’d struggle even to create a tool like that because we don’t have catchments often um and often people’s places are allocated in reception but then people move all over so there’s even less data I mean is that a problem in London that kind of or is there sort of you just have to roll with the fact that you’ve made an assumption on that entry point in terms of catchment does that make sense yes yeah so I mean yeah there are a lot of assumptions in in our model and I think and the the information on how far children are traveling is from school catchment information um and then that it’s converted to sort of a SEMA people travel distance based on that and I think that I mean they are they are relatively stable over time and especially kind of comparatively so in terms of like the use case we’re trying to establish it is also around just kind of where should we focus and and you know what are those distances and I think that you obviously you well you do get exceptions and you get kind of people moving around but but in terms of the overall percentages at schools it’s it’s fairly um stable at least over a couple of year period yeah yeah I think um right I’m just going to go to my questions in the chat here um Nick goof asks did you ask to see the independent school of travel pans um or state schools I’m presuming not because that’s the whole of London that you’re looking at we we did use Independent School travel plans to um and and data on their people dispersion that they disclosed within them to inform the model that we sorry the assumption that we then put in for all Independent Schools but we we we didn’t go like on an individual caseby case basis for Independent Schools obviously because we wanted to do we’re trying to do it at slightly broader scale but that did in form the um assumption that we made um and Sally Bean asks um why aren’t Highway authorities doing this well I yeah I mean I think just coming this not in I mean I’m not I’m obviously I’m kind of a parent and a and a campaigner and I’m not I don’t have a background in travel policy my background is in kind of my professional life background was in kind of corporate analytics but it was to me like such a really obvious thing that’s needed um but I just think that yeah I guess I think probably that independent authorities here and there kind of do have data that they are using obviously with some of this but it’s also it’s not in the hands of the public and I think that’s what we wanted to um get out there is actually it’s really useful for campaigners to know this information as well yeah absolutely um do you want to stop sharing your screen by the way and then we and H I think you’ve got a hand up again do you want to ask Niar a question yeah um you saw I posted something about trip training and I don’t does everybody understand trip training what it is it’s basically where if you’re not in a car you can call at different shops on the route and people will take their children to school and maybe do the daily shopping or catch the train to work all as part of a continuous chain which is much easier to do on foot or by bike and I wonder how many people are actually using trip chaining for that uh as a very efficient way of traveling and I know that a local supermarket on buyers Road had the highest revenue per two but a tiny car par and that was because everybody on their way to or from work or to take the kids to school called in and bought the daily milk and the bread or if they saw something nice they buy it then and it was is really successful it’s footfall and it’s people on foot going and combining the journey to school with doing something else I wonder how that fits yeah so um I think that there we that um there is trip sh I’m just trying to recall how we built that into our model but I think that we have um accounted for that um and there is some very very high level data that was used in the propensity to cycle tool that Anna shared with us that was around you know trip sharing or or the total number of trips that are just directly to school and back again but again the the data is so high level and and actually I think to really um really dig into what parents need on the school run and what’s going to make them change Behavior we absolutely do need to know how many parents are going straight onto work how many parents are going you know combining the pickup with multiple other kind of um stops as you said you know how many go on to after school clubs you know we we need to know much more about those Journeys and it’s just a really limited um I mean it’s just I I think that that is absolutely essential to be able to you know give parents solutions that are convenient and sustainable but it’s just it’s just that data is just not there at the moment sort of relatively detailed level yeah I I I come back um I get special boots made because I got odd feet and the clinici um drives the child to the child care center and then drives to the station and occupies a car parking space at the station all day but she gets the train to work at the hospital because the car parking at the hospital is so poor that it’s actually easier to get the train and walk to the hospital from the station and we we agreed that if if only was a child care Nursery at the station they could combine the whole she could get rid of the car you could just take the child to the station leave the child at the station and go to work and this is the sort of thing that um we’re building out of the way we design our our environments how we work yeah well exactly and that’s or or maybe some level of kind of of trips from St of of child of sort of school run shuttles from stations out to nurses you know that’s one of the things we’ve looked at in dge in terms of actually could you start running shuttle buses from stations to some of these schools because then parents can just go to the station and then go back onto work or or on onward Journey they don’t have to do the additional sort of 40 minute round trip of the 50- minute walk and from the station to the school and back so having lots of Gran information on those types of trips I think would would be so helpful to then understands what what sorts of things you could put in place to help to help parents um R you got a hand up yeah hi thanks Nicola that was awesome absolutely fabulous so excited by that brilliant thank you um two things you mentioned safe roots to school which I don’t think you’re old enough to remember but the the labor party did have something called safe roots to school which was very very very successful and every single school had to sign up to it um the tourist got rid of it in 2010 and replaced it with stars which to my knowledge isn’t nearly affect enough and doesn’t seem to work so I just wondered if you have been lobbying government for any of their manifestos to have safe boots to school back and the other was did you have any data on school holidays traffic because you mentioned Independent Schools and the distances they tend to drive and it’s very notable where I am in chisik West London that during the school holidays traffic is much much lower and the buses can get through quicker blah blah blah so I just wanted is is there any data that you’ve been able to do for that or it doesn’t fit in with what you do thank you so I’ll the second question first data on the school holidays so we we did local analysis on the roads uh local to us that showed a a really seismic impact on um uh in the school holidays when we sort of showed it for Independent Schools and state schools um and the impact that that had on both number of cars but also congestion and it did show really clearly that when Independent Schools dropped off um there was a huge reduction in congestion and there was quite significant you know there there was quite significant reduction in in the number of cars but it was actually not as significant as we thought relative to the change in congestion and I think that really just showed to us it’s because you know if you’ve got even a 100 cars all coming at the same time between 8 8:45 and 9 or 8:30 and 9 that is going to congest a road um so so it was as soon as those cars had lifted that’s why the congestion just kind of really reduced um so it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s kind of the number of cars it showed very clearly there was both the number of cars but the fact that they’re all traveling together that had such such a sort of big impact so we’ve got that locally um but the school run cruncher which I’ll I’ll happily send you so that is a uh We’ve sort of teamed up with possible on this tool which is exactly to track um roads in the school holidays and in the school ter time and it tracks that um via Google Journey times um and it will the end of that project is going to show um the school the school traffic patterns over holidays and over term time for different types of school so if there are schools near you that really do have awful School run congestion then put pop them in the tool and it will start sort of crunching away in the background and hopefully in a year for the next academic year and hopefully in September 2025 there’ll be some really powerful data to highlight the impact of school run traffic um so on all those routs but also individually on each one um on the safe roots to school I I’m really familiar with um CFL stars or travel for life which is now called but I’m not sure what the preceding um initiative was um so I I can’t speak to that per se but we do Lobby locally for school streets cycle routs um and that every school should have you know safe modes for children to travel and that is also one of our general election asks thank you um I think I I wondered whether you’d spoken to anyone in active travel England about this in terms of data and um you know people who might have influence over questions that that go in the School census no hav yet um but we yeah I mean we’re going to pull our election Manifesto together and we would really like to we’re going to write to you know obviously um um the sort of Shadow cabinets or candidates um but it would be brilliant to if people you know to to to speak to um at Travel England and the Department of Transport and I think the census question really sits with the Department of Education as well so um any contacts there would be very helpful yeah and for them to talk to each other well thank you so much Nicola and I hope you’ll come back um and and share sort of any updates and and news about the project because I think it’s definitely one to watch and um and it would be wonderful if someone was inspired to do this for other parts of the country um so I think everybody will join me in in saying thank you and um and we will now move on to Mark right good evening everybody uh two seconds to range just gonna just break the action just to uh shamelessly plug something for Peter Murray um on Sunday there’s going to be a picnic at Bank Junction in the city of London uh and this is kind of get the mood going for the court of common Council next week on the 20th um and the idea here is just to highlight the fact that there’s very very heavy lobbying going on by the taxi trade to get taxi back through bank during the day during the week um so please look for Peter on Twitter and also search for him on LinkedIn where he going to be posting updates as he goes so that to one side get back to the advertised slot um so this week slightly shorter than the uh emergency presentation last week but we’re going to go over to Sweden um and talk about the origin of vision zero so can I just maximize my screen give me a second here uh never remember how to do this can I ah there we go there we go right hopefully that’s there off we go so uh we’re going to go back to 199 five um on the E4 Motorway off ramp near arir in southern um Stockholm um there was a crash five young people died in a three-o pers 205 um and the driver hit concrete foundation of lighting column so quite some time ago um and back then we had clar tingvall who’s the newly appointed traffic safety director at the Swedish Road Administration as it was there it’s now the transport Administration um he asked the local Regional director what was going to happen with the lighting column um he was shocked to be told that it was actually just going to be replaced and he was also um perturbed that the responsibility for the crash was fully with the driver um that was customer practice at the time um it was one of those things driver to blame we’re not do anything so this is a quote from class he said removing the foundation would be tantamount of admitting guilt I was shocked over the mentality that prevailed that crashes were subject to moralization and the cause was always salting the actions of the victims that the dri was driving too fast or too recklessly or was drink driving so that was a watershed moment for for class at the time um so as he was newly appointed he was obviously getting uh to the root of what was going on for his new job so he and his team looked at while wondered why the road system itself wasn’t been looked at and only really the victims of being blamed rather than the system itself um his team proposed designing out what was dangerous which is where Vision zero started to form in their heads so there were three basic points that he considered that life is more important than anything else um we responsible for road safety and by we he meant professionals and we know what to do again we the professionals they know what to do to deal with these issues so fast forward for a couple of years and these ideas were were properly crystallized and it was adopted as policy in the Swedish parliament in 1997 and that policy position was nobody should be killed or seriously injured on the road Network and it was the job of professionals to design Safe Systems and that’s both vehicles and the roads themselves um there is more updates and it’s it’s gone through a bit more policy development since then but this really was the start of vision zero um as people call it um so Tal’s team started to look what was killing people on Swedish roads so bear in mind this is sort of mid 90s so the main issue they found was highspeed collisions on uh sorry head-on collisions and highspeed Rural single carriageways um anybody that’s not really that familiar with Sweden will know that there is there is a train network but actually the rural single car Road network does lots of heavy lifting the country isn’t particularly busy away from the cities um but it is it’s a communication thing um but that’s where the collisions were occurring now the standard treatment at the time and indeed in other countries was to duel these single Carriage ways which obviously cost a lot in terms of land take and and physical cost of doing it and putting barriers on the central reservation so um because we’re not particularly talking about a capacity issue here this is this is a safety issue isue um he proposed a 2+1 operation and I’ll give you an example of that in a second um and that was met with significant public resistance surprise surprise um so the sketch there is his original sketch of what he was looking at doing so essentially and largely he was taking the footprint of the single carriageway he was squeezing in three traffic Lanes into that footprint and again generally speaking he it was the footprint print some local Works were needed but largely that’s space have got less work with it and fairly simply it would alternate between two lanes in One Direction and one in the other as you can see on the left here and every so often there’ll be a crossover where um One Direction would go back to two one lane and the other side would go from one Lanes to two lanes um so even though he had significant public resistance um he was allowed to proceed with an experiment and he went to the E4 Motorway north of uh yevi um and it was a complete success it really really massively reduced the collisions through there and here is an example of the road layout and this is nearad which is to the uh let’s get this right to the east of of Malmo down on the south coast um and what you can see here is General footprint going on um we’ve got you can just see in the distance there uh there’s two lanes coming into one coming towards us on the other side and going away from us looking through the wind screen here’s one lane and that opens up to two in the distance um as I say within the footprint generally of this um original single carriageway route uh and the e65 here is running along kind of the South between Malmo and uhad so we’ve got the footprint with narrow Lanes um left turns will only ever go across one oncoming Lane and from one running Lane so where we’ve had the the two lanes in One Direction one in the other there’ll be sections where it’s only one lane in each Direction and the central areas used to provide these left turn Pockets it would be right turn in the UK um it allows overtaking of slower vehicle so that kind of deals with some of the frustration issues that people struggle to cope with um but if you’re using these roads for longdistance travel then having opportunities to overtake slow Vehicles is probably a good thing as I said before this is not about capacity this is about safety um and as it turned out again surprise surprise the arrangement became very popular with the traveling public so that’s the roads let’s look at um the cars so we’re still in the mid90s here in 1996 the Swedish national road Administration joined with the FIA which is the um International uh Vehicle Authority if you like or organization and they join together to look at how vehicles um were being designed and how crash were they were and the rest of it and that spawned the Euro incap which I’m sure quite a lot of people in the co would have heard of and it stands for the European new car Assessment program and this is where Motor Vehicles get tested and they get star rating however there was a criticism of vision zero ear early on um quite a lot of it was reliant on people actually signing up to um obey the rules and we know that rules are there to be broken um and people do misbehave they do speed they do ignore um band turns all this kind of thing and and there’s a lot of focus on protecting drivers from each other so if we go back to the rural roads this was about protecting drivers from each other so things moved on um some of the measures were expensive people walking and cycling and that wasn’t really a thing back in the early days evision zero um however um there were lots of measures they deploying so here is um strand gon which is um on on the outskirts in the suburbs of Malmo and it gives you a really good example of some of the traffic calming work that came from Vision zero so what we have here um Urban single carriageway Road um 30 mph speed limit um and what we have here is say actually a zebra and cycle Crossing which connects there’s actually a cycle track over on this right hand side um and this connects into an estate over on the left hand side there but what they’re doing here is breaking things down so we’re slowing drivers at this point of conflict where pedestrians and cyclist are crossing with the chicane um and we’re also for people crossing we’re having them cross into two go so they only have to deal with one uh traffic lane at a time and then over on the right hand side as I say there’s a separate footway and there’s a cycle track so we’re separating the modes so this is kind of the vision zero design approach in action here um so the things they looked at we go back to the median barriers for the the um the rural roads lots more roundabouts were introduced interestingly looking at speed limits which deal with what the human body can uh withstand in a collision on the area of research are is called biomechanics and as I’ve just said traffic calming became a big thing and also speed cameras um so that’s kind of where it started now it’s it’s more slightly so we’ve got three things we’ve got ethics responsibility and solutions so there is this ethical thing that people should not die um just by going about their business and that’s that’s fundamental here um there’s a responsibility here that the designers of these systems must realize that people make mistakes and system designers are Road designers and the vehicle designers as well and solutions are um it’s not about doing one thing it’s about several things so um tackling drink driving and having forgiving Road layouts is trying to do more than one thing to find the solutions um so if we are generally motivated to remove death from the streets and serious injuries I think we all are um just a word of warning here we need to be careful with absolute numbers so we do we talk about Vision zero and that’s people not being killed or seriously injured but we mustn’t get into the um issue of looking at just pure numbers because we can really really um deal with these well by kicking the vulnerable people off the street so um UK suffered from this we’ve done lots of work to make it difficult to walk and cycle and we said oh these streaks are safe because we’re not hurting anybody well they’re not there to be hurt in the first place so just have that in in their minds in the back um there’s also the whole issue of risk compensation so if we make Vehicles really safe and comfortable uh people take more risk because they feel um that the vehicle is going to save them if you like um and that also can go out to engineering measures that we deploy so again we’re kind of protecting the drivers from themselves but not necessarily people outside um so they don’t adjust their behavior um and quick one to finish off this is really interesting so who else has adopted Vision Z we’ got a little timeline there with you New York City going through to British Columbia tfl in UK in 2018 now interestingly the city of hobin in New Jersey they adopted it in 2019 but they’ve not actually had any road death since 2017 this is as of March uh this year when I look this up well worth going to look at what they’re doing doing doing a c search for the city um and some of the engineering projects so if you look on the left hand side there in the US this is known as daylighting and but what they’re essentially doing is at the Junctions they’re building stuff out there’s a rain Garden here in the foreground just so it’s impossible for drivers to park near the Junctions we might just use yellow paint in the UK but you know there are things that can be done to physically keep people away from the Junctions and what this is doing is making it very very obvious um there’s a Crossing it’s see and be seen um and that’s something they’ve rolled out certainly in the city of Hoban quite widely and then interestingly we’ve got greater Manchester combined Authority they are currently Consulting on the vision Ser strategy and that closes on the 27th of this month um that’s it for me for this week I’ll probably be coming back next time with the Dutch system just so we can draw a comparison do we have any questions or comments thank you Mark that was fantastic um I’ve got one question in the chat from wi actually who says we protect Motorway workers by average speed cameras is it time to protect all other Road users in the same way potentially um speed cameras are very expensive um if you deploy them in urban areas and you’re trying to um link them together uh you’ve got to be very careful where you deploy them so you’re actually trying to get you need to get people between two cameras to actually draw what the um the average speed is but not quite sure what current prices were but but probably four or five years ago when I last looked at speed cameras you may be looking at 50 60,000 each um there’s probably better measures we can deploy which don’t don’t have to have enforcement behind them thank you um does anyone else have any questions that stun silence I know hi um Paris I believe as long ago as 2017 or something banned lorries in the city between certain hours and recorded zero deaths um we uh I cycled through chisik this morning and one road was kind of full of lores on double yellow lines making it incredibly difficult to get through safely and for pedestrians to cross the road I mean they couldn’t see either side of these laes are we anywhere near having any kind of delivery strategy in this country which older people than me will remember that we used to have before the noise of atement society stepped in and said well we can’t possibly have lers at 6 o’ in the morning um because it is a you know we know that Lori death Lori crashes cause a lot of deaths especially to pedestrians and cyclists yeah it’s it’s it’s the kind of thing that will be devolved to local authorities and Regional Authority so London does have um the lond London Lorry control scheme as it’s called that still runs um you can see some very old Tatty uh weight limit signs around the place usually just after a trunk Road into the side roads um that’s enforced by London councils with a very very small team um there was a Spate of barers pulling out because they had to pay subscription every year I think that’s now been covered by tfl centrally so yeah London lry control that is still there and that is in theory Banning lores over I think it’s 16 and a half tons I might be wrong um but that’s overnight Saturday afternoons and Sundays um if you go around certain parts of London um it’s obviously not being enforced at those times so that is a very very old scheme that I think probably goes back to um maybe in GLC days um but no there’s there’s no National approach it’s it’s all localized thank you um Amy um yeah I just wanted to say we’ve got over 10 areas in Britain that have adopted Vision zero we did a Blog on this last year when Oxfordshire was Consulting on it so you got warshire Devon and Cornwell Essex Kent I think Sur now so there there are many places Liverpool leads there there are many places that have adopted Vision zero already in Britain are they are they measur success because um if you look at Liverpool I believe they’re one of the worst performers for casualties in the UK and again health warning over absolute numbers again um but they don’t seem to be doing very well especially with pedestrians I recall no that’s right but they only adopted it last year so it be too early to tell yeah yeah but I do think it is good to highlight the difference between Vision zero and Road danger reduction because Vision zero as you said is only focused on reducing K SI yeah thanks yeah definitely Health definitely have a health warning from from the early days Sweden has probably pushed on a little bit from the start but I’ll just say um I used to work for TRL and back in 2000 they sent me to Sweden for the day to learn about Vision zero and I mean you know Sweden didn’t have didn’t have cyclists not many pedestrians at the time so they were only focused on car occupants and they were already on their second plan at that point in Vision zero and they were looking at making uh things like winter tires be mandatory and they were looking at like saving 11 lives you know they already had very few deaths and there it was a very technical approach but it was very focused on vehicle occupants because that was their problem yeah thanks Amy um Andrew yeah hi Mark thank you um what so if you I’ve got family in Sweden so I go there once every year I guess um what’s really obvious there is actually everything’s kind of relatively simple and easy to understand um whereas certainly my my bur kind of the approach seems to be reduce road clut to make streets as straight as possible and wide as possible and then wonder why walking cycling feels quite hostile and why is it so difficult to adopt simple things that we see elsewhere in the UK if I knew the answer to that be running a massive company selling that service somewhere but um I I think you’re right I mean I I only know south of Sweden um but I’ve seen that foot cyc and driving so yeah little bit of an Insight but not obviously somebody’s been there a lot but yeah I mean even when you go on the um yeah the two plus one roads it just it makes perfect sense it’s it’s all sensibly laid out it’s nice and easy I suspect some of the difference between the UK and Sweden largely is probably the amount of traffic that probably plays quite a a big role uh I mean even Malmo um not massively busy compared with you know Birmingham or or London or somewhere like that so that might have something to do with it but when when you go around and see how things are set out continuous side roads um there’s definitely a hierarchy place so 30 mph Road you’ve probably got cycle track in a footway now um you’re getting cycle tracks between the towns and The Villages again it’s not rolled out everywhere and it’s not perfect by any means but it’s it’s kind of there isn’t it there’s there’s there’s something going on that we don’t seem to have managed to grasp here thank and another Andrew hi um Mark just a question about tfl’s Vision zero do you think it carries much weight um with um local councils I think it very much depends on the council um and there are borrows in London that probably couldn’t care less um they probably some that that couldn’t care less because I genely just don’t care because politicians are more interested in in other things and there are some burrow that are trying stuff but they’re not really getting to the heart of going after the types of things that hurt people so it’s not about um s the traditional Road Safety approach is looking at Collision clusters and trying to treat those clusters um there are still bars out there doing that um the ones that are doing better kind of they know the layouts which are dangerous and they’re gradually redesigning layouts generally so even if no one’s getting Hur there sooner or later somebody might be guessing hurt there so I would say it’s very very patchy okay thank you and oh I think H had a hand up but it seems to have gone now um if everybody has finished with their questions I think we will wrap up H A big thank you to Mark and we look he forward to hearing about the Netherlands um I’m just trying to find out who we have next week for you oh yes so uh next week we have Sarah M mcmonagle who is the director of exle Affairs for cycling UK and she’s going to come and share cycling UK’s new strategy so um that should be very very interesting for everyone here um but I think if everybody would like to join me in thanking our speakers tonight I hope you all have a lovely evening and we’ll see you next week thank can I just make a a quick addition oh go on yeah it’s a point rather an addition um I’ve just posted a link there it’s in the bmj um I’m trying to get a year on it 1982 um it’s something my dad put in about Scandinavian and Dutch lessons in childhood road traffic accident prevention so that’s that’s a useful point if any of you interest in some of the early Study Tours thank you very much that’s super thank you James right we’ll see you next week bye