Ep. 1 – Transforming Birmingham’s Roads: The Vision Zero Approach

Filed under: Podcast

A conversation with Jeremy Leach of Action Vision Zero about the 2025 Birmingham Road Harm Reduction Strategy

The conversation explores Birmingham’s road safety strategy, focusing on the adoption of Vision Zero, which aims for zero fatalities on the roads. The discussion highlights the Safe Systems approach, the importance of reducing traffic volumes, implementing lower speed limits, and creating safer road infrastructure. The role of education in road safety is debated, along with the impact of vehicle size on pedestrian safety. The conversation concludes with thoughts on post-crash care and the need for radical action to implement Vision Zero effectively.

actionvisionzero.org

Transcript

Kevin Carmody (00:06)
Prior to the adoption of Birmingham’s 2016 Road Safety Strategy, the region had been seeing a steady decline in the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads. Since then the numbers have remained more or less stable. About 22 people are killed each year and 400 suffer serious, often life-changing injuries. In other words, the progress has stalled. The 2016 strategy lacked a holistic approach, focusing only on small areas

like single junctions where there have been clusters of road traffic collisions and using measures like speed bumps, pedestrian refuges or guardrails that are now known to be ineffective at protecting vulnerable road users. The knock on effect is that there is a general decline in walking and cycling. We’ve actually got one of the lowest rates of walking in the UK. So clearly that road safety strategy hasn’t made people either be

or feel safer. Zoom forwards to March 2025 when the City Council publishes the new Birmingham Road Harm Reduction Strategy, this time adopting the internationally recognised Vision Zero approach, following the likes of Oslo and Helsinki which in the last 12 months have experienced no deaths on their roads. Key to this new plan is reducing the number of cars driving into this city, but whether we can really achieve this?

and our goal of zero road deaths depends on strong leadership and community buy-in. Today, I’m talking to Jeremy Leach from Action Vision Zero about this concept that began in Sweden and that we hope will transform Birmingham to become one of the UK’s safest cities for all road users.

Kevin Carmody (01:52)
Jeremy, thank you very much for joining me.

Jeremy (01:54)
Great to be here, thanks Kevin.

Kevin Carmody (01:57)
So, ⁓ could you tell us what the idea behind Vision Zero is and what influence it might have on the design and management of our roads and streets?

Jeremy (02:07)
So the idea of Vision Zero in relation to roads and streets comes from Sweden in the mid 1990s and they were feeling that what was going on in say the rail industry or the air industry or you know in other other sectors this idea that death and serious injury at work or in those performance transfer is not acceptable that could be transferred to roads and streets. They had a slightly different problem that they were

initially focused on, which was in Sweden there’s an awful lot of say two or three lane A roads throughout the country and they were there was a slightly more rural roads problem that they faced and then they evolved that’s been evolved in relation to Vision Zero where it’s been taken up across other countries to be a bit more of an urban focus because that’s where pedestrians, people walking and cycling are particularly vulnerable. So Vision Zero is now the

adopted road strategy in a huge number of American cities, in a number of locations in the UK and is an approach being taken across Europe. And essentially the idea, exactly as you said, is that in the longer term the target and the approach will be we will work towards zero fatal and serious injuries over a period of time. And in London, for example, the end target date is 2041. It’s different in Scotland and other places. But yeah, that’s the idea.

series of interventions will be taken to support that.

I think that if you take this Vision Zero approach it is going to affect every aspect of how your streets and roads are designed so this is something that changes and not just in relation to road casualties there are other benefits from it and I will maybe touch on those later but this is a wholesale change and I think you’re right to talk about Oslo and Helsinki as examples that have succeeded.

Those cities are transformed by what’s happened in a positive way.

Kevin Carmody (04:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, okay, so in order to get to Vision Zero, you need a methodology. the method that Birmingham is adopting is the SafeSystems approach. Is that the common method that you see across the world?

Jeremy (04:30)
the approach that’s normally adopted is the safe system one. So one focuses on speeds, safe streets and roads, safe vehicles, safe behaviors or people, and then the post-collision ⁓ implementation, how people are supported ⁓ after a serious crash.

What we would argue is missing from the safe system is the idea of less traffic. There’s some fantastic work being done by a ⁓ Canadian researcher called Todd Litman which absolutely lays bare the need to reduce traffic. And he gives an example. mean, the most recent one that’s really interesting is, I don’t know if you read about New York City having adopted congestion pricing early in this year.

Kevin Carmody (05:21)
Yeah.

Jeremy (05:21)
quite

a of guffawful about that because a certain president was against it and wanted to revoke it. That hasn’t happened so far, I’m really pleased to say But the reductions in traffic in New York City have had a number of benefits, most notably is significant reduction in casualties. So we would argue that there are few examples of genuine significant casualty reduction using Vigil0 which don’t also include a reduction in traffic volumes. And what’s really good

through the most recent Birmingham strategy is there’s a lot of talk about reducing traffic volumes in exactly the right places. However, and I’m sure you know more about this than I do, it’s whether that’s being delivered and how it’s being delivered. That’s politically always the most difficult thing.

Kevin Carmody (06:10)
Yeah, so Birmingham, we did introduce the clean air zone in Birmingham, but I think that ⁓ more had an effect of changing the types of vehicles that were coming in rather than reducing. The same technology, I’m sure, could be used for congestion charging. ⁓ But yeah, as you say, that’s an issue of political will. There is, I mean, as you say, it does talk in the Birmingham Road Harm Reduction Plan about ⁓

reducing the traffic, but there are no targets in there as to when to reduce it. There’s no method of delivery on that. Perhaps that will come in a different document. I mean, it’s good that it’s at least there as a principle. Yeah. So, ⁓

Okay, so let’s continue on the Safe System. So Safe System uses two basic facts about people, which is to say that people make mistakes when they’re on the roads and people are vulnerable to being killed or seriously injured if they’re involved in a crash. If we use these kind of basic tenets, these kind of basic ideas, what does that…

How does that help us as a starting point?

Jeremy (07:25)
I think it then informs all of the aspects that I’ve just described, speed, vehicles, street design. I think it then guides all of those. Maybe I should just flesh out each of those a little bit, because I think it is the vulnerability of the human body, particularly in an urban area, and the fact that people make mistakes, and then it’s how to address that. So for example, in relation to safe speeds,

Kevin Carmody (07:46)
Yeah.

Jeremy (07:52)
crucial element is the speed limit and compliance with the speed limit. There seems to be an absolute movement now towards 20mph speed limits. We’ve seen the incredible success of that, though politically fraught, in Wales, in central London, inside the North and South Circulars. There’s virtually no roads which are not 20mph. is the default in big areas. Scotland is moving towards 20mph default. In Birmingham, the rhetoric has

great on 20 mile an hour, they’ve talked about residential roads but they’ve also talked about main roads and there’s a recognition in the strategy that where collisions are at their greatest number is where people and vehicles mix and that would be high streets, town centres. So it’s really important those main roads are also addressed. The problem in Birmingham that in spite of a lot of talk about this and they’ve even asked the government in the past to move to a default, only 18 %

the roads are 20 mile an hour in Birmingham so there’s there’s a there feels as though there’s a really big gap between the rhetoric and this has lasted for quite a while the rhetoric and the delivery and and the reality is that you know 20 mile an hour speed limits are not that expensive to deliver especially if you go to the idea of it being a default as has happened in many of the London boroughs and you know the local authority there has said well we’ll just you know we’ll move to a default 20 mile an hour and we’ll accept the roads that we don’t think

appropriate and Birmingham could do that and it will not be that expensive and will have a significant impact.

Kevin Carmody (09:28)
So I think one of the requirements because the Birmingham City Council, to their credit, have asked the central government ⁓

twice now I think they recently asked again for a reduction to default 20 miles an hour they were previously denied saying it would need to be a national limit. We know that it would have to be on a kind of road by road basis now which I think there are claims that it will cost us something six to seven million to roll that out across the city.

Jeremy (10:00)
Yeah.

Kevin Carmody (10:01)
Obviously we know there’s huge economic benefits that will come back from that, but one of things we have in this road harm reduction strategy is that the intention that any…

B or A roads would be expected to remain as 30s. And so many of Birmingham’s roads have been classified and they cut all across city. And many roads which you would think this must be an unclassified road is actually considered part of the strategic network. It’s a B road. they continue using that as their model, you will get this kind of continual 20->30, 20->30 across the city.

Even if they all the residential roads and urban sensitive I get 20

Jeremy (10:46)
Sorry, and that’s really problematic because, example,

Kevin Carmody (10:47)
Please. Yeah.

Jeremy (10:52)
There’s an element of the inconsistency, say 20, 30, 20, that’s problematic for drivers and that’s understandable how it is difficult when it chops and changes. What I would say is transport for London have managed purely arterial roads in London. They have now got 150 miles of their arterial roads in London, which are 20 miles an hour, have 20 mile an hour speed limits. you know, where people and vehicles mix, that’s where the greatest risk is. Those roads should be included.

of those are A roads and you know maybe a few B roads. And the other thing is that in London we have examples of numerous boroughs where they have moved to a default 20 mile an hour limit without having had government support to that. So I’m sure there are specific reasons but I think they need investigating because all of these precedents have happened in England before.

Kevin Carmody (11:49)
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we’ve talked about 20. I’ve just kind of finished on that. It is such an effective policy. In Wales, it’s something like 25 % reduction in casualties over the first year of or 18 months of implementation. And that’s with no police enforcement on that. That was just got that job. And also the lowering of insurance bills, mean, £45 per person. So it’s such an effective policy.

Okay, so the 20mph, the reduction of speeds is, as say, one of the tenets of the safe system. Another one we have it would be described as safer people, that they are well-educated drivers and safe drivers.

Jeremy (12:36)
Yes, I mean, I think we’ve always been cautious around education because I think the great problem with a lot of road safety strategies over donkey’s years has been that, you know, we will educate people to do something and that’s really tough and there’s a huge numbers of advertising campaigns that have struggled to prove their effectiveness. I think we feel that more effective are

policies that change the way streets are designed reduce for example the impact of ⁓ traffic in through residential areas removed through traffic from from those kind of streets and You know for example, you know make create safe environment for people who are cycling. I mean

I’m sure it’s more complex than this, people cycling need three things. They need protected infrastructure and lanes on main roads. They need other vehicles to be traveling at no more 20 miles an hour. And then they need residential neighborhoods not to have through traffic. mean, this is not that. And then for pedestrians, then a safe ⁓ town center will have a lot more capacity to cross roads safely. So you’ll have pedestrian crossings on all arms of junctions.

you’ll have frequent crossings where people are desiring to cross. Another thing that’s being talked about now is the idea of these zebras on side road crossings, which has been being pioneered. Again, that can be absolutely relatively low cost. You know, having side road zebras as piloted in Manchester without Belisha beacons drastically reduces it and starts to give the protection that the recent changes to the highway code has envisaged. So there’s lots of things that can happen that

Another thing in town centres is maybe just to have one lane of general traffic. if it’s multi lanes then you have a bus lane and then a general traffic lane but not having numerous lanes, removal of gyrates. I know that starts to get really expensive but there are lower cost interventions in town centres and High Streets that can really start to change the environment and don’t have to be hugely expensive. I think education is…

education campaigns they’re really risky to rely on and again they they mean that people aren’t having the politically different difficult conversations that actually affect real change.

Kevin Carmody (15:02)
Yeah,

and you know, let’s let’s be realistic to start driving you have to do a lot of training in the first place It’s not like these aren’t people who haven’t already gone through, you know months of lessons and tests and all sorts

Jeremy (15:16)
And the changes that

happened to the highway code were really beneficial to people cycling and walking. I think the moves to support the new highway code and emphasise it are really positive.

Kevin Carmody (15:35)
So we touched on briefly ⁓ another tenant, is to provide safer roads. And much of that is certainly in areas is to just reduce the through traffic. Now, this is, you know, a call of if we need to roll out a Vision Zero strategy, we need to be getting on and delivering.

you know, these politically sensitive things like low traffic neighborhoods. And that is how, you know, places like Oslo and Helsinki have managed to do it is they have rolled out. This is how London is doing it. I mean, we have, we have, you know, kind of one well-known low traffic neighborhood in Birmingham and it is, it has been a lightning rod.

Can Vision Zero be delivered without those types of implementations?

Jeremy (16:24)
I

don’t think you can deliver Vision Zero effectively without addressing traffic volumes, but I think you can make the delivery of lower levels of traffic easy.

What we have worked on is, I mean there’s a number of interesting elements here. So for example, deprivation is a really significant element of people being involved in road casualties and crashes. If you live in an area that’s

more deprived than you are twice as likely to be involved in a road collision as you are if you live in a more affluent area. again, know, there are less affluent areas tend to have lower levels of traffic and car ownership. So the whole conversation starts to be a bit easier around reducing traffic through neighborhood streets, such as has been called healthy streets is called healthy neighborhoods or low traffic neighborhoods. So I do think

Kevin Carmody (17:03)
Yeah.

Jeremy (17:23)
focusing on those communities where the level of harm is innately highest and rolling them out on that basis is a lot easier. the other thing that was inevitably not done brilliantly at the time of the pandemic was just this issue of engagement and consultation. And I think while you can have the idea to reduce traffic on neighbourhood streets, you’ve then got to let the community help you to design those interventions. And I think if you can bring people much more easily with you, the other thing is

that’s got to happen at the same time you’ve got to be thinking about how you’re reducing traffic on main roads because people are rightly concerned that there will be a migration of some traffic from the through traffic from the neighbourhood streets to main roads you’ve got to be thinking about how you’re going to reduce traffic on main roads as well

Kevin Carmody (18:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, this does rightly recognise that a lot of incidents happen around areas where there is so much parking, so much density of parking. I think there’s like, it kind of suggests that might be people are being forced to park illegally or in inappropriate places because of ⁓ the lack of parking. And then that is causing blind spots, people parking in corners of roads and, you know, making pedestrians have to take ⁓

riskier paths across junctions.

Jeremy (18:47)
Yeah, I think there’s a place in…

I might be wrong on this but there’s a place called Hoboken in New Jersey where they’ve deliberately done work around those junctions and I think it’s called daylighting to make sure that there are gaps between where cars are parked close to the junction and the junction and their strategy has been almost based around that and some traffic calming as well and they have had a number of years in that city of zero casualties based around exactly that point of trying to create safe spaces for pedestrians.

cross at junctions and again that narrative supports the idea of side roads, zebras making that dangerous crossing of side roads more safe. ⁓

Kevin Carmody (19:31)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, side road zebras, they’re fascinating because they’re such a cheap implementation but we’re blocked, aren’t we? Again, the Department of Transport are cautious, should we say.

Jeremy (19:44)
They’re

cautious but I mean there is, the City of Westminster has undertaken a number of pilots and now a number of other London boroughs are interested in that and hopefully they’ll get support from Transport for London as the overarching highway authority there. again hopefully it’s been delayed but the Department of Transport is about to produce its road safety strategy hopefully in January and one can hope that all the evidence that’s been found for the impact of side road zebras will

come out to give it support there.

Kevin Carmody (20:17)
Yeah, yeah. one of the tenets on this is safer vehicles is ensuring that, the road, because of course there will always need to be, ⁓ you know, people who need to get around ⁓ by cars ⁓ and, trucks and that sort of thing, but ensuring that there is

Jeremy (20:24)
Hmm.

Kevin Carmody (20:40)
you know, they’ve got their MOT, that they are safe to be on the road. We don’t see any mention in this on the dangers of increasingly larger vehicles. I mean, we know that they cause far greater harm and far greater risk to pedestrians, but there’s nothing in this strategy or that I’ve seen from the council. I mean, is this something you see in other Vision Zero cities?

Jeremy (21:08)
think it’s an emerging issue to be fair to Birmingham and other places that have adopted visions here. think this is quite state of the art research, so there’s been two fantastic…

There’s been two fantastic campaigns started almost from scratch this year (2025). The car spreading campaign by Clean Cities and also the SUV Alliance by AdFreeCities and they’ve almost come in parallel but I’m sure they’re working closely together and they have absolutely brought into focus the dangers that larger vehicles, SUVs, cause over lighter vehicles and I think there are now

⁓ but

interventions starting to be considered by some local authority. I think Cardiff’s looking at differential pricing. think some London boroughs are starting to look at differential parking pricing, I’m sorry, for larger vehicles. But I think that’s very much only a start. I think that there’s got to be bigger, stronger approaches from larger highway authorities on that. But I think it’s being recognised. I think it is early for cities and places to incorporate that into vision zero

but it’s certainly thanks to those two campaigns on people’s radar now and is a really really important issue but shouldn’t detract from the fact that it’s overall all cars can represent a danger and a risk to people walking and cycling in particular.

Kevin Carmody (22:41)
Yeah,

Jeremy (22:42)
I think that just really quickly Kevin, just to pick up on the fact that what’s happened over time is that car safety has tended to benefit people who are vehicle occupants, people inside the vehicle. So all the car safety improvements have made it relatively safer for people in a vehicle but have less addressed the danger of vehicles to people outside the vehicle. So what you’ve seen over time is the proportion of ⁓ serious and fatal casualties amongst people who are

walking cycling has increased compared with car occupants and that’s been quite a big trait. So I think the really interesting move now will be how can, for example, autonomous emergency braking, intelligent speed assistance, which are speed limiters on cars, they are safety improvements that benefit people outside the vehicle and certainly intelligent speed assistance has got a huge potential impact when used say in conjunction with lower speed limits.

Kevin Carmody (23:40)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is something that it needs the local authority to also work with the national government in order to deliver these programs and having more Vision Zero cities, you know, demanding these changes, you know, can only ⁓ help the delivery.

Jeremy (24:04)
Yeah, but exactly as you say, there’s a huge role for government here. So in 2022, the previous administration didn’t adopt what are called the general safety regulations. So all, for example, all new cars now inside them, you can switch on over rideable intelligence speed assistance because of the fears of the war on the motorist and the plan for drivers that that wasn’t adopted in 2022. We have the potential at a

stroke to adopt that, perhaps in the road safety strategy that’s going to be published and those safety benefits can start to help people in the UK as they are across Europe.

Kevin Carmody (24:46)
so the last tenet I have here is post-crash care. And this is again a part of that multiple agencies working together that not one can deliver this.

Jeremy (25:00)
Yes and I think there’s a number of strands here. ⁓

The most important thing is that the amazing work of the emergency service is saving lives and is saving more lives of people who are injured on the roads, which is a fantastic thing. think where there are opportunities for significant improvement are in the quality of the investigation. So it’s really important to the civil compensation that people can claim that there is a sense of who was at fault and that

people who will say walking and cycling are able to claim for the civil compensation that will help them rebuild their lives and that needs high quality officer investigations not just for fatal crashes but also for serious casualties and then I think there’s the whole issue of how we learn from crashes you know I think you know there are often coroner reports that say this should change but they’re always very location specific

and we don’t learn, we don’t learn from fatalities in a way that society could learn and we could make a huge difference by actually taking the knowledge we have. You know, it’s so easy to say, you know, that happened there and it could be made applicable to a much wider range of cases and we refuse to learn because our societal focus is so around the motor vehicle and the right to drive and overlooking the impacts that it has. So I think that there are, and then

think there’s support for victims. There’s some great work done by the Sarah Hope line, by Break and Road Peace, but having that support that the city or the local authority, highway authority, ensures is available for people is really important and that can again make a difference as families and people rebuild their lives.

Kevin Carmody (26:55)
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s been a great overview of Vision Zero, particularly as it applies to Birmingham.

Thank you very much, Jeremy, for your time. Yeah, yeah, it’s great to be able to kind of shine light on this. So

Jeremy (27:10)
That’s been really really enjoyable to talk to you about this, thank you.

Kevin Carmody (27:17)
Thanks a

Kevin Carmody (27:25)
That’s it. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to this Better Streets for Birmingham podcast. If you want to find out more about our work, you can find us at betterstreetsforbirmingham.org where you can join for free and get involved in all the different projects that we do around the city. Thanks very much for your time. I look forward to seeing you again. Bye.