Mark Corbin was in conversation with Craig Thomas

WMCA recently launched its Regional Road Safety Action Plan, which covers the period 2024-2030. At the root of the plan is the concept of Vision Zero – the long-term ambition for no one to be killed or seriously injured within the road transport system. 

Mark Corbin, Director of Network Resilience at WMCA, recognises that the journey to Vision Zero will be long and arduous, but it’s one that is necessary.

“It’s a difficult journey down to zero,” Corbin states. “Our interim measure is a 50% reduction by 2030, but that is just an interim step towards zero, because it's going to take us some time. If you look at Sweden, where they started on a Vision Zero target back in in 1997, they haven't even landed anywhere near zero yet. The principle in itself is clearly right, and we should adopt it, but the journey towards getting there is challenging.”

Changing culture

According to Corbin, the biggest challenge is culture. “We've got a country where our culture associates movement with motorised vehicles. It’s led to a legacy of bad behaviour that introduces death and serious injury in the road environment.”

Another is the way our roads are designed, Corbin explains: “The environments that we have to operate within to deliver Vision Zero are difficult because they’re designed for high-speed motorised traffic. They don’t lend themselves to getting to a point where deaths and serious injuries in the road environment will reduce straight away. 

“The starting point for us in our action plan is taking a step back and recognising that we need a Safe System. How safe is the system that you are expecting people to utilise as a designer? How safe is that road and the vehicles that are going to be using it? Do speeds match the environment where the vehicles will be operating? What does post-[collision] care look like?”

Tackling speed

Corbin expands on the aims of WMCA: “Our plan features 23 key actions. The biggest of those is around speed, because speed is a killer. We know within the West Midlands, 33% of those killed or seriously injured on our roads is directly attributable to speed, so we have to fix our speed problem. That will involve more enforcement, working closer with our police and local authority colleagues, and using the data that we get from our road network to understand where the issues are.

“There are also items within our action plan that drill down into International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) ratings, so we can understand them and enable us to introduce safe cycling and get people out of their vehicles.

“There's a mixture of activity that needs to happen to move us closer to that target of zero. And of course, education will play a massive role in how we help our communities to understand [that] actually there's a lot of trauma being created in communities on the back of killed and seriously injured people on our roads.

“Even if we were to achieve, for example, our target of 50% by 2030, that's still well over 500 people in the West Midlands that are going to be killed and seriously injured on road by 2030. There's a lot of work to do to get there, but even when we get there, we're still talking about 500 plus people that will be killed and seriously injured.”

Read more from CIHT: Data and its role in reducing inequality on UK roads.

Image: West Midlands ambulance in Stone, Staffordshire; credit: Shutterstock.