Disabled road users

There is very little information on road traffic accidents affecting some of the most vulnerable road users, for example people with disabilities and equestrians. Police STATS19 data do not routinely record whether someone is blind, partially sighted, deaf or a wheelchair user. Until 2000, data were not collected on horses involved in road traffic accidents. 

However, PTW safety figures have not followed the impressive improvement trends of the last decade that other users safety figures demonstrate. Moreover, per kilometer driven, PTW riders have a much higher risk of being killed than car occupants, between 9 and 30 times higher. PTW riders are also more likely to be very seriously injured in a road crash with long term disabilities than other motorized road users. They are also more vulnerable to impairment by e.g. alcohol. 

The Safe System, explored in detail in Chapter 6, places a moral responsibility on those who design, build, and operate the road system to do their very best to ensure no one is killed or seriously injured. But this moral responsibility has not been codified—it is, in effect, a responsibility for solving the traffic safety problem. This is the sense we should adopt when we use the Swedish term Vision Zero, as opposed to the traditional placing of total responsibility on the individual road user for his or her own fate. Elvik has correctly argued that zero is absurd if taken literally, as it would require a level of investment that would result in such a drastic redistribution of public monies that other ways people die or are disabled would be increased in frequency. It needs to be seen as a forerunner of, or a catalyst for, a broader shift in the way we think about our cars and in the way we use our roads. 

Although Road Safety Audit does look at scheme design from the road users points of view, it is fundamentally different to a road user audit - which has the primary objective of representing a road user group (pedestrians, cyclists or people with disabilities) to ensure they have been adequately catered for within a scheme. The Highways Agency (HA) has published a separate standard (HA, 2005) describing how to undertake road user audits for non-motorised users on trunk road and motorway schemes. 

Problems for visually impaired pedestrians were mentioned 56 times while wheelchair users were mentioned eight times. The main road safety risks identified for people with disabilities were ... 

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