This year’s SoRSA Conference will be a must attend affair for anyone involved in Road Safety Audit. Whether a developer, project manager, designer, or auditor, you need to be here to make sure you are up to date and informed.
The conference will be taking place across two afternoons in a virtual setting on our all-new virtual event platform to allow you to manage your time effectively and attend as and when you can from the comfort of your own home or office.
Following feedback from this year’s survey that was released to members in January 2021, the conference will consider vulnerable users and cover worked examples of real-life issues. It will also consist of a dedicated session on cycle safety, with some of the most prestigious speakers on the subject.
The first day will cover a mock Road Safety Audit which will cover a range of problems for each Auditor to identify. We will have a speaker from RNIB, one of the UK’s leading sight loss charities and the largest community of blind and partially sighted people who will explain some of the difficulties blind people face and what Auditors can consider when reviewing designs. We will also host the ‘Is this a Problem?’ session but taking it to the next step.
Day two of the conference will cover a range of cycling design and problem identification, all with a different twist. We will cover rural cycle design and when things do not go to plan if problems are not identified within Road Safety Audits.
DAY ONE
13:15 – 13:30 OPENING REMARKS
Deborah Sims FCIHT, Senior Vice President, CIHT
Stewart Knowles FCIHT FSoRSA, Chair, Society of Road Safety Auditors
13:30 – 14:30 STAGE ONE ROAD SAFETY AUDIT EXERCISE
Ian Medd MCIHT FSoRSA, Independent Road Safety Consultant
Alastair Pike MCIHT MSoRSA, Head of Road Safety, Vectos
14:30 – 14:40 BREAK
14:40 – 15:10 SEEING STREETS DIFFERENTLY - ISSUES FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEDESTRIANS
Dr Catriona Burness, Parliamentary & Policy Manager, RNIB Scotland
15:10 - 15:20 BREAK
15:20 – 15:50 OLDER DRIVERS FORUM - DRIVING SAFELY FOR LONGER
Rob Heard, Chair and Founder, Older Drivers Forum
15:50 – 16:00 BREAK
16:00 – 16:30 IS THIS A PROBLEM?
Tristan Brooks MCIHT MSoRSA, Director, go-surveys Ltd.
Eric Hill MCIHT FSoRSA, Principal Engineer, Sweco
16:30 – 16:40 BREAK
16:40 – 17:10 ESTABLISHMENT OF ROAD SAFETY CENTER IN SAUDI ARABIA
Omar Kabbush, Civil Engineer, Saudi National Road Safety Center
17:10 – 17:20 CLOSING REMARKS
Stewart Knowles FCIHT FSoRSA, Chair, Society of Road Safety Auditors
17:30 – 18:30 ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Hosted as a separate event on GoToWebinar. You can register for this event via our main event listing on our website.
DAY TWO
13:30 – 13:45 OPENING REMARKS
Den Symons MCHIT FSoRSA, Chair, Society of Road Safety Auditors
13:45 – 14:15 WHY ARE WE SEEING AN INCREASE IN ACTIVE TRAVEL SCHEMES AND HOW CAN WE BETTER UNDERSTAND THEM AS AUDITORS?
Fraser Arnot MCIHT, Associate Director, Atkins
Rob Hunt MCIHT FSoRSA, Managing Consultant, Atkins
14:15 – 14:25 BREAK
14:25 – 14:55 WHEN ROAD SAFETY AUDITS GO WRONG FOR VULNERABLE ROAD USERS
Brian Deegan MCIHT, Technical Director, Walking & Cycling, Urban Movement
14:55 – 15:05 BREAK
15:05 – 15:35 ROAD SAFETY AUDITING FOR CYCLING
John Franklin, Cycling Skills & Safety Consultant
15:35 – 15:45 BREAK
15:45 – 16:15 THE NATIONAL CYCLE NETWORK AND RURAL ROADS
Will Haynes MCIHT, Infrastructure Director, Sustrans
16:15 – 16:25 CLOSING REMARKS
Den Symons MCHIT FSoRSA, Chair, Society of Road Safety Auditors
If you have any questions about the SoRSA Conference, please do not hesitate to contact our team on +44 (0)20 7336 1555 or conferences@ciht.org.uk
This year's conference will count as 7-hours worth of CPD for all attendees. Please note that we do strongly encourage you to attend the entire conference and all sessions that are scheduled to take place.
Please complete and download your certificate here.
This presentation will identify key issues for visually impaired pedestrians in the context of a streetscape under transformation. Addressing the challenge of climate change has seen moves to reduce car dependence whilst the coronavirus crisis has prompted a re-think of how we all get around. We have seen temporary changes to street layouts, largely to encourage cycling so that people don’t have to use public transport.
Street layouts can cause difficulties at the best of times for visually impaired people. A recent RNIB survey identified issues that were important for them to help them get around safely. These largely fell into three key themes:
The presentation will examine how these issues can be addressed, and streets be made safer and more accessible to people with sight loss.
Rob's presentation will explain the Older Drivers Forum and why it was set up. The presentation will give statistics about older drivers and explaining the risks and issues older drivers can have on our roads and what we can do to help our ageing population to carry on driving safely for longer and when is the right time to retire from driving.
This talk is useful for all, from those with elderly relatives to those who have a responsibility for safety for road users on our roads, from advice on road design and practical things we can all do.
This session will be an interactive talk and discussion about features we often come across during the road safety audit process, but begs the questions “Is this a Problem?”
Drawing on personal experience, research and through discussion Tristan and Eric will look at a variety of situation and scenarios to consider if there is a safety issue and how it may be resolved.
Road safety auditors frequently identify situations where there may be a real or perceived risk. This workshop that looks at various scenarios and raises the question “Is this a problem” and encourages participants to voice their thoughts, experience and knowledge and discuss with their peers.
This interactive workshop is an open forum where every opinion counts and not every item discussed has a right or wrong answer.
Omar Kabbush has worked within the National Road Safety Centre for 3-years as a Civil Engineer and is currently undertaking his MSc in Transportation Engineering. As a Team Leader, he has responsibility for a National project on In-depth Fatal Collision Investigations.
This presentation will start with the background of the establishment of the Saudi national road safety center and the process through the Saudi vision realization programs 2030 covering the targets for five years. The presentation will cover the efforts that the Saudi national road safety center is making to reach those goals. Briefly covering five main projects: road safety platform, training and professional certification, technical investigation on multiple fatalities road crashes, development of economic model to estimate the cost of traffic crashes, and the some of the awareness campaigns the center lead with the related stakeholders.
This presentation is aimed at the public and all road safety colleagues around the globe, especially those who are involved in the international impact of road safety and the decade of action plans for road safety.
Recently there has been a notable increase in active travel (walking & cycling) schemes, with highway authorities looking to promote walking and cycling for a multitude of reasons. This naturally has an impact on road safety auditors when we are asked to audit these schemes. How can we better understand them as auditors?
This presentation will provide an overview of recent changes to active travel-related policy, standards and guidance. It will also give an overview of ‘GG 142 Walking, cycling and horse-riding assessment & review’ and its role in GG 119 RSA briefs.
The presentation will then highlight some typical road safety issues to look for when auditing active travel schemes and will consider the wide variety of users that might wish to the schemes we are auditing.
This presentation uses actual, yet anonymous, road safety auditor comments to point out issues with the interpretation of the procedure. It argues that auditing can systematically fail vulnerable road users by ignoring obvious safety issues for them, whilst simultaneously being overly sensitive to the needs of drivers. For example, driver frustration at being slowed down or stopped is more likely to be raised as a safety concern than the inability of children, crossing the road, to judge approach speeds over 20mph.
If Road Safety Audits are to be objectively useful then this presentation will argue that the needs of all users must be understood.
It is a common perception among cyclists that road safety audits too often have little concern for the impact of road schemes on cyclists. There is a need to change that perception.
This presentation will be an examination of how cycling should be accommodated in road safety audits. Cyclists are a very diverse collection of individuals who vary greatly in terms of experience, competence, aspirations, age, attitudes to risk, where they prefer to ride and optimum speed. A safety audit cannot be carried out on the basis of one size fits all. In fact, auditing for cycling is probably more complex than auditing for any other mode. However, when auditing fails to consider cycling adequately, which is too often the case, there can be serious consequences not only for safety but in discouraging the beneficial contribution that cycling makes to society in terms of sustainability, health, pollution and equity.
This talk is aimed at anyone who carries out road safety audits, at those professionals responsible for commissioning and assessing audits and at anyone responsible for road design and traffic management.
The National Cycle Network currently comprises a mix of on-road and traffic-free routes. Sustrans’ vision for the Network is to create a UK-wide network of traffic-free paths for everyone, connecting cities, towns, and countryside. Developing this network will take time and so in order to retain a connected network, on-road sections will be required at least in the short to medium term.
This presentation will discuss the challenges around facilitating walking, cycling, and riding on rural roads and consider solutions to address these in a way that acknowledges the needs of all road users.
Interested parties will be those with responsibility for managing minor rural road networks, people interested in making minor rural roads more accessible and safer for a wider range of road users.
In addition to the main conference programme taking place on the main stage, our all-new virtual event platform will provide you with the opportunity to network, make connections, visit exhibition stands and join breakout sessions.
The virtual platform is free to access, you do not need to download or install anything, and is very simple and straight forward to use. All you need is access to a laptop or computer, a stable Wi-Fi connection and a basic understanding of IT.
We have created a Hopin Delegate User Guide that should help you navigate the Hopin platform. We strongly recommend you take a moment to read through these notes to help you in preparation for attending the conference.
This year, the SoRSA AGM will be taking place virtually at the end of the first day of the conference. The AGM will be taking place as a separate event on GoToMeeting which you will need to register to attend separately from the SoRSA conference. You can register to attend the AGM here.
Please note that if you are not registered on GoToWebinar for the AGM, you will not be able to access the virtual meeting.
The AGM is free for all SoRSA Members to attend and will take place at 17:30 - 18:30 on 21 June.
Got a question?
t: +44 (0)20 7336 1555
e: info@ciht.org.uk