Part of a ‘Rode Along’ study comparing cyclists’ views
on interactions with measurable data.

“Does the council have to wait until somebody is killed before they do something?” is an oft heard cry. Very often people are reacting to a near miss which are around 250,000 times as common as fatalities. Near misses and further away misses are sufficiently common to be worth studying and allow us to identify issues before that feared fatality occurs. We have studied interactions between pedestrians, joggers, cyclists, equestrians and dogs on canal towpaths for British Waterways and elsewhere with Heriot Watt University. This background research allowed us to answer the question whether e-scooters were more dangerous than cyclists on towpaths for the Canal & River Trust.

Cycling against the flow on one way streets is mostly safe. The problems come at junctions. Here in Cambridge our surveyor records a near miss.

Techniques developed for studying interactions between active travellers can also be used to answer questions like why were there problems at the parallel crossing over Huntingdon Road in Cambridge and is contra-flow cycling on one way streets safe? The answer is yes, it is totally fine (mostly). We’ve also spent a lot of time staring at films of the Dutch Style Roundabout in Cambridge learning that the design is very sensitive to getting the details right.

Decline in risk of a collision on the Wilmslow Road Cycleway

Following a question from one of the delegates on our Active Travel Infrastructure Design course for the IHE we looked into safety on the Wilmslow Road Cycleway in Manchester where the reduction in collision risk is pretty impressive.

Wheelchair accessible cattle grid following our research

Engagement and consultation can also count as research particularly if you are using that to inform design or policy changes. For instance in York we used an engagement process to understand how to make accessibility improvements to access control barriers to devise guidelines for more inclusive designs.