Sally Watson's presentation at the "We Walk, We Cycle, We Vote" – Training Event – 5 March 2016 in Glasgow

1. Sustainable safety:
designing streets the Dutch way

2. What is sustainable safety?
• Intrinsic safety or
lasting safety: safety
by design not safety
by regulation
• Streets become
places where people
aren’t pushed to the
periphery by cars

3. Sustainable safety in the Netherlands
• Idea introduced in early 1990s as a way of tackling road deaths and injury
• “The central issue is that people, even if they are highly motivated to
behave safely while using the road, make errors that may result in crashes.”
Advancing Sustainable Safety, SWOV, 2005
• “Sustainable Safety aims to ensure that road safety depends as little as
possible on individual road user decisions. The responsibility for safe road
use should not be placed solely on the shoulders of road users but also on
those who are responsible for the design and operation of the various
elements of the traffic system.” Advancing Sustainable Safety, SWOV, 2005

5. Who benefits?
• Everyone!
• Vehicles and people with
very different speeds and
masses are not expected
to share the same space
• Urban environment
becomes more people-
friendly.

6. Five principles of sustainable safety
• Functionality
• Homogeneity
• Predictability
• Forgivingness
• State awareness

7. Functionality
• All Dutch roads are
classified according to
their function and fall
into three categories:
access, distributor and
through roads
• These streets have a
mono-functional
design which is
appropriate for their
purpose

8. Functionality
• Idea comes from
Buchanan’s 1963 report
Traffic in Towns
Swav.nl taken from Traffic in Towns

9. Through roads
• Fast roads carrying
high volumes of traffic
• Motorways, trunk
roads, bypasses
• Completely separate
facilities for cycling and
walking and usually at
a distance from the
highway

11. Distributor roads
• These connect the
access roads to the
through roads
• They carry more
traffic than access
streets so a greater
degree of
separation of
modes is necessary

13. Access roads
• These are typically
residential streets
• They are not through
roads and therefore
carry very low volumes
of traffic
• They are designed to
slow down traffic

15. Homogeneity
• Difference between
mass, speed and
direction of travel of
vehicles using same
space is minimized

16. Predictability
• Roads made predictable
by using consistent
designs
• Street design sets
expectations about how
the space is used
through use of materials
and colour, and
consistent design of
crossings

17. Forgivingness
• Anticipating mistakes
and accepting that
humans are fallible
• Making sure that
mistakes aren’t fatal

18. State awareness
• Education becomes
an essential
complement to
sustainably safe road
design
• NOT a replacement
for good design

19. Can we do this here?
Yes!

22. Further information:
SWOV – Advancing Sustainable Safety:
http://www.swov.nl/rapport/dmdv/Advancing_sustainable_safety.pdf
Cycling Embassy of Great Britain:
www.cycling-embassy.org.uk
Newcycling sustainble safety articles:
http://newcycling.org/tag/sustainable_safety/