National Highways must come clean on pedestrian and cycle safety

National Highways’ Safety Trap: Why Counting Deaths Isn’t Enough

We recently highlighted National Highways’ serious failure to meet its road casualty reduction targets – despite their claim that “safety is our most important commitment”.

Worse still is their failure to protect the very people whose safety they most need to be concerned about: those travelling along or across the road corridors they manage on foot, by cycle or on horseback.

It doesn’t help that they have a deeply flawed ‘performance indicator’ for measuring the safety of these groups. Their aim is simply to reduce the number of non-motorists killed or seriously injured (see p36 of their 3rd Roads Investment Strategy, or RIS3). This creates a perverse incentive. The easiest way to reduce the death toll of pedestrians and cyclists is to discourage people from walking or cycling in the first place. But it also means less healthy, sustainable transport—the exact opposite of what the government says it wants.

Funding Cuts Limit Progress

Major roads and motorways often sever communities, acting as barriers rather than connectors. National Highways’ ‘Designated Funds’ are supposed to address this problem (amongst other things). However the funding allocated for active travel schemes has always been inadequate, and has been steadily cut with each new 5-year Roads Investment Strategy (RIS) period:

• RIS1 (2015–20): Originally £100m, which was expected to deliver 200 cycling schemes. This was soon cut to £85m.
• RIS2 (2020–25): The active travel budget was further reduced to £80m.
• RIS3 (2026–31): It is now down to just £55m – and risks being cut further to boost defence spending.

Adjusted for inflation, the RIS3 active travel budget represents a massive cut in real terms. It can only be expected to deliver around 100 active travel projects, i.e. around one or two per county over the next five years. Without central government investment in active travel links along or across the corridors of the motorway and major ‘A’ road network that National Highways manages, it is hard to see how local councils can be expected to plan joined-up walking and cycling networks for their areas.

The Data Black Hole

The limited budgets for active travel mean National Highways has little incentive to gather data on the impact of these investments. But that creates a vicious circle: without evidence of the benefits provided by these investments, there is little justification for increasing the budget.

This is why National Highways persists with its deeply flawed approach of simply recording the numbers of deaths among non-motorised road users, rather than measuring pedestrian and cycle safety in a more sensible way.

That would involve adopting ‘rate-based’ indicators, i.e. measuring the risk of a pedestrian or cycle injury per mile or per trip walked or cycled. This approach recognises that it is perfectly possible for walking and cycling to become safer even when the numbers of people injured is increasing, so long as the levels of walking and cycling activity are increasing more steeply.

But to calculate this rate, you need to know how much walking and cycling is taking place. National Highways has refused to collect this data since it was first proposed in 2014, despite the Department for Transport telling them they needed to adopt better performance indicators for pedestrian and cycle safety in 2015 (see p26 of this document). With no information on whether or not National Highways’ spending since then has increased walking or cycling, or improved safety for those who do so, it is very difficult to justify additional investment, even though this is clearly needed.

A Culture of Secrecy

Starved of active travel investment, National Highways seems to have adopted a bunker mentality. A Memorandum of Understanding with Active Travel England, adopted in 2024, was not published until Transport Action Network unearthed it under the Freedom of Information Act. Even now, we can see no signs of the promised annual reports on progress in putting it into practice. Other key documents also remain unpublished, including an assessment of active travel investment priorities that Parliament was promised in 2023. They also apparently produce bi-annual reports on their active travel initiatives (see p35 of RIS3), but these too seem to be kept under wraps.

Redistribute funds across the country

With the detailed delivery plans for RIS3 expected by the end of this year, there is a narrow window to fix this. National Highways needs to:

1. Start monitoring active travel activity, then use the data to set meaningful indicators for pedestrian and cycle safety.
2. Publish all data and reports that are currently kept under lock and key.
3. Shift its focus from massive, expensive road projects to local improvements that actually connect communities.

If National Highways wants to help deliver the Prime Minister’s promise of “Economic growth in every postcode”, it surely needs to redistribute the billions of pounds earmarked for huge road schemes like the Lower Thames Crossing, and start investing instead in local connections that make a tangible difference to communities throughout the country.