National Highways must come clean on pedestrian and cycle safety

We recently wrote about the serious failure of National Highways to meet its road casualty reduction targets – despite claiming that “Safety is our most important commitment” (see p5 of their 2026 Annual Report and Accounts).

However there is one crucial aspect of road safety for which they aren’t even able to set sensible targets or performance indicators (PIs), despite having been told to do so as long ago as 2014.

We’re talking about the safety of pedestrians, cycle users and equestrians travelling along or across the road corridors managed by National Highways (i.e. the motorways and major ‘A’ roads which make up the Strategic Road Network, or ‘SRN’). And because they can’t set a sensible indicator, they have once again decided to set a silly indicator instead.

Their chosen indicator is simply to reduce the number of non-motorised and motorcyclist users killed (see p36 of the third Roads Investment Strategy, RIS3). The reason this is silly is because it perversely incentivises them to deter people from walking, cycling or horse-riding – because that will mean fewer non-motorised road users getting killed or injured! But deterring active travel is exactly the opposite of what National Highways should be doing (and which the Government wants them to do), for all sorts of environmental, health, economic and social justice reasons.

After all, motorways, major A-roads and their monstrous junctions can present huge obstacles to getting around by walking, wheeling or cycling. This is especially true where major roads plunge through urban areas, or act as bypasses, cutting off towns and cities from nearby rural communities, or preventing urban dwellers from being able to get out into the countryside without jumping in the car to cross the bypass.

This is why the various ‘Designated Funds‘ that National Highways has allocated over the years for tackling this ‘severance’ problem could have been so valuable – but also why the tiny (and steadily reducing) sums of money involved have been so frustrating.

During the period of National Highways’ first Roads Investment Strategy (‘RIS1’, 2015-20), the funding allocated for cycling provision was initially £100m (which was later cut to £85m), that was expected to deliver 200 cycling schemes. During the second roads period (RIS2, 2020-25) investment in active travel was further reduced to £80m. In the current RIS3 period (2026-31), it is now down to £55m – and risks being cut further to boost defence spending. This, of course, is much more than a 50% cut since 2015 once you take account of inflation. It can therefore be expected to deliver fewer than 100 active travel schemes, amounting to just one or two National Highways schemes per county over the next 5 years. How on earth are local councils expected to deliver joined-up active travel networks in their areas, when central government is investing so little in overcoming the barriers to active travel created by major ‘A’ roads and motorways?

Yet this lack of investment also means National Highways has little (if any) incentive to bother monitoring what their active travel programmes are achieving. Unfortunately, this creates a Catch-22 situation. Without the capacity to monitor active travel, National Highways struggles to provide evidence of the beneficial impacts of its active travel investments – and that in turn makes it far harder to argue that there should be more of them. So the lack of demonstrable progress results in a continued failure to make progress.

It also hampers efforts to get National Highways to monitor pedestrian and cycle safety in a more sensible way. This would involve setting what are known as ‘rate-based’ indicators, i.e. measuring the risk of a pedestrian or cycle injury per mile or per trip walked or cycled. Rather than simply measuring changes in pedestrian and cyclist casualty numbers, this more sophisticated approach takes account of changes in walking or cycling activity, recognising that more pedestrian or cyclist injuries doesn’t necessarily mean that walking or cycling have become “more dangerous”. Indeed, the risk of walking or cycling could have fallen, as long as the increase in pedestrian and cyclist injuries is lower than the increase in levels of walking and cycling.

However, to set ‘rate-based’ indicators for pedestrian or cycle safety, National Highways would need to know how much walking or cycling activity is taking place along and across its network. They do not know this, and have repeatedly resisted pressure to find out ever since this issue was first raised with them when RIS1 was being prepared in 2014.

The Department for Transport (DfT), which oversees National Highways, accepted at the time (i.e. 2014) that the organisation lacked the data on walking and cycling activity needed to set sensible ‘rate-based’ indicators for pedestrian and cycle safety. However the DfT told National Highways that it needed “to provide PIs that measure the safety of vulnerable users”, hence it should “develop new metrics for future Road Periods, to help demonstrate that it is supporting the government’s aspiration for improving provision for cyclists, walkers, and other vulnerable users more generally on and around the SRN.”

Yet 5 years later, when the second Roads Investment Strategy (RIS2) was being prepared, it became clear that National Highways had made no progress on this, despite repeated pressure from Cycling UK and others during the intervening years. So they again set an unhelpfully simplistic indicator simply to reduce pedestrian and cyclist casualties.

Then – like Groundhog Day – it happened again in 2024, as they started developing RIS3.

So, how do we get out of this self-perpetuating mess?

Well, DfT has once again told National Highways that it needs to improve its approach to monitoring. Specifically, RIS3 tells them (on p35) that they must start to “develop the performance metrics for RIS4”, and that they must “publish a Performance Framework Improvement Plan, approved by DfT”, with 6-monthly progress reports on this being provided to DfT and the Office for Road and Rail (whose role includes regulating National Highways). This could be a great opportunity to press for sensible rate-based indicators for pedestrians’ and cyclists’ safety.

However, they also need to be a lot more transparent about what they are doing. For instance, National Highways signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Active Travel England in 2024, yet this has never been published. Nor has the organisation ever published the “assessment of active travel integration along its network” that former Transport Minister Jesse Norman assured Parliament that they would be conducting, “in order to identify major or complex severance issues, as well as opportunities to connect with wider active travel provision, such as national cycle networks.” They have since told us that this was never published as a single report, but they claim the findings have fed into the Route Strategies which shape the Roads Investment Strategy, together with the outputs of a “live mapping tool” – which isn’t publicly available either.

Meanwhile RIS3 also states (again on p35) that National Highways will “continue to report bi-annually detailing its performance and initiatives to serve riders, walkers and cyclists using the approach developed in the second road period” – the implication being that they have been reporting bi-annually on this in the past. Yet these reports also appear to be unpublished.

In short, National Highways seems to have developed a bunker mentality. They don’t seem to want the public to offer suggestions for action to improve active travel accessibility along and across their route corridors, presumably because they haven’t got the funding to respond to these suggestions.

A better approach would be to welcome suggestions, and use these to build the case that there is far more to be gained – economically, environmentally and politically – by allocating far more of their budget towards localised improvements, rather than mega-bucks road schemes like the Lower Thames Crossing. After all, the new Prime Minister is talking about “economic growth in every postcode” and the importance of local communities. Maybe National Highways’s budgets should be redistributed and localised to reflect this?