Road traffic injury is the leading cause of death for those aged 5 – 29.
World Health Organisation
Why Vision Zero?
Around 1.2 million people are killed on the world’s roads each year. Another 20-50 million are seriously injured. In the UK, that has one of the world’s better road safety records, on average five people are killed on the roads every day.
The Vision Zero concept refuses to accept this astonishing level of danger on roads; the idea that death and serious injury are an inevitable part of moving within our road system.
It understands that people are fragile, that they make mistakes and that we need to build a system with layers of protection around them. In doing so it puts human life and health at the centre of how we design and manage our roads.
The Vision Zero for road casualties flows from a “Safe Systems” approach that has been adopted in many other industries and modes of transport to great effect. There are almost zero fatalities per billion miles in rail, compared to an overall rate of 4.7 deaths per billion vehicle miles for road transport (2024) with far higher levels for those walking, cycling and riding motorcycles .
Road danger in numbers
- Around 1.2 million people are killed on the world’s roads every year (World Health Organisation).
- Road traffic injury is now the leading cause of death for those aged 5 – 29.
- Across the EU, 20,017 people were killed on the roads in 2024. From 2019 to 2024, the EU27 achieved a 12% reduction in road deaths.
- People on foot (18%) and people cycling (10%) together comprise 28% of all fatalities on Europe’s roads (2022).
- In Great Britain, 1,602 people were reported killed on roads in 2024. This compares with 1,752 road fatalities in the pre-pandemic year of 2019 (Department for Transport)
- There were 27,865 serious injuries in road traffic collisions reported to the police in 2024 and 128,272 casualties of all severities. But these figures could be much higher as there is evidence of significant under-reporting.
- The numbers of pedestrians killed on Great Britain roads in 2024 was 409 and the numbers of people cycling killed stood at 82.
- People walking, cycling or on motorbikes have much higher casualty rates per mile travelled in comparison with those in motor vehicles.
Vision Zero – Background
Vision Zero was pioneered in Sweden in 1997. Many cities have adopted their own versions since, including more than 30 US cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago. In the UK, Transport For London (TfL) has set itself a target that by 2041 no one will be killed or seriously injured on the capital’s roads. Liverpool also adopted Vision Zero in 2017.
Despite initial successes in many of these cities, there has been some doubt about the long-term impact of Vision Zero, especially for vulnerable road users.
Sweden’s Vision Zero approach was accused by Vision Zero Cities Journal of being “disproportionately car-centric” with improvements such as safety measures in cars almost exclusively benefiting motorists. Meanwhile “vulnerable road users — the elderly, children, cyclists — continue, to a large extent, to die or get in collisions with motor vehicles at the same rate as before”.
This is partly because the measures aimed at reducing the risk to people walking or cycling have also discouraged that activity. Telling cyclists to wear fluorescent clothing, for example, or teaching children that roads are dangerous, could lead to a decrease in walking or cycling in general.
This bias in road safety management is unfair, giving the most dangerous modes of transport the best safety measures and the most benign modes the least protection.
Next level Vision Zero
For far too long road safety measures have focused on hiding people away from the danger, behind barriers, beneath underpasses, or holding adults’ hands. The time has come for an enhanced vision that also boosts the life and activity on our streets. In enabling more people to walk, cycle or take public transport, we can also remove the vehicles that are causing the danger. This is about removing danger at its source.
This approach is also called Road Danger Reduction, pioneered by the Road Danger Reduction Forum, and adopted in Transport for London’s Vision Zero approach. This strays from traditional methods for road safety that use casualty reduction as the dominant measure of success. Instead, it acknowledges that the principal source of danger on the road is motor vehicles and seeks to reduce this danger at source.
This approach, with less traffic at its core, also brings much wider benefits for society in terms of better health through increased activity and lower air pollution, lower carbon dioxide emissions and stronger communities.
Above all this approach is fair: it provides greater focus where there is greatest risk (the most vulnerable people on roads) and gives everyone, whether or not they own a car, open and safe access to our networks of roads, streets and public spaces.
This is not going to be easy. It requires brave leadership and difficult political decisions to reverse a long history of road building and promoting travel by private motor vehicle. But the potential rewards for us all are huge.
Beyond the Safer System
The UK government is developing a new road safety strategy. It is a decade since the then government adopted the Safe System (2015). This was a major step forward with its acceptance that people could not be educated or trained to be infallible, and the responsibility should be shared with system designers and operators. This was also a move towards road danger reduction, which recognises that harm is caused by both inappropriate and excessive use of motor vehicles.
Different Safe System approaches:
In reality, however, in the years since its adoption there was very little impetus from government to embed such an approach in policies to reduce road danger. The incremental improvements that have occurred have largely benefitted vehicle occupants rather than those who are principally impacted by the danger that vehicles pose to them.
An exception to this has been in London where the TfL Vision Zero Action Plan (2018) and the Progress Report (2021) incorporated road danger reduction across many of its policies.
UK Government upcoming Road Safety Strategy
Five key high-level Vision Zero road danger calls for the next road safety strategy are:
- A road safety strategy should sit under a wider transport strategy and the higher aims of improving air quality, enabling active travel, supporting communities with healthy streets and decarbonisation. There should be an end to the silo approach of thinking with road safety where eliminating road deaths and serious injuries are the only goals that matter. Just as strategies must consider restricted financial resources, so they should also embrace these other goals.
2. To prioritise reducing the harm posed to people walking and cycling. Why this focus? Because:
A. Priority. People are being urged to walk and cycle more, and drive less.
B. Lagged behind. Motor vehicle occupant casualties have reduced faster and farther than those to walkers and cyclists.
C. Inequity. People walking and cycling face a disproportionate risk. They are much more likely to be seriously injured, if not killed, in a collision with a motor vehicle whilst the occupants are far less likely to be injured.
D. Co-benefits. There are environmental, energy and public health and community wellbeing benefits that come from reducing the relative and perceived risk of walking and cycling.
E. Urban and rural strategies. People living in urban areas face different opportunities and road safety needs to those in rural areas. As in the Vision Zero strategy developed for Leeds, urban areas should aim to be places where a car is not needed.
3. Other Key Performance Indicators needed. Cycling and walking needs to feel safe and this is different from reducing the number of people killed and seriously injured (most of whom will be inside or on motor vehicles). The Healthy Streets approach has Feel Safe as one of its 10 indicators and so should road safety strategies.
4. Joint approach with the police. Just as road safety strategies are often joint with transport and police at the local/regional level (i.e. London), so should the national strategy be. There are financial reasons for this, given the amount of revenue raised in traffic fines.
actionvisionzero.org 