To listen to the podcast: https://soundcloud.com/momentum-transport/s2-2-nico-bosetti-on-vision-zero
Or read below:
Mailys Garden:
Hi everyone and welcome to this new episodes of Conversations in Momentum, brought to you by the teams at Momentum Transport Consultancy and Momentum Transport Canada. I’m Mailys Garden.
Joe Tang:
And I’m Joe Tang. Thank you very much for joining us today for another episode of Conversations in Momentum. It’s been absolutely fascinating hearing everyone’s transport highlights and stories so far and looking forward to a bit more of that today.
Mailys Garden:
Yeah, I know, me too. I have to say it’s been really great to be part of all of this podcast so far. I think one of my vivid bits from season one was hosting some of our directors and getting to hear all about their own transport experiences and the wide range of schemes that they’ve been involved with over the years.
Joe Tang:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s always nice to be able to sit down and pick someone’s brains, especially when they’re the experts that we’ve got to hand.
Mailys Garden:
So let’s get started and today absolutely delighted that we are joined by our colleague, Nico Bosetti. And Nico joined Momentum in October, 2022 and sits as part of the planning team. Prior to this, he managed research projects for think tank, centre for London. Nico’s passionate about creating new developments that not just towards making sustainable choices and are accessible to everyone. Thanks for joining us today, Nico, and very warm welcome.
Nico Bosetti:
Thank you for having me.
Joe Tang:
Great to have you on the podcast, Nico. So to kick things off, we always start by asking our guests to share a story or a highlight from their career. Now this could be absolutely anything that they’ve got from the top of their mind that’s transport related. So pushing you on the spot from the word go. Would you have an interesting highlight that you’d want to share with us?
Nico Bosetti:
Something that sticks out is when I was in my previous role role at Centre for London, we were working with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London over a year-long project to help them manage pressures on their high streets coming out of the pandemic and especially looking at movement along Kensington High Streets. I don’t know if you know that’s that High Street, it’s a bit like Oxford Street and away in that has a real contention between creating a high street that is safer for vulnerable users and more pleasant to spend time on while preserving its function as a main gateway in and out of London City Centre.
And this leaves a situation where every year a group feels a bit shorthanded and there’s a conflict between different interests, pedestrian cyclists, public transport users, taxi drivers, just to name a few. And so my colleagues working on that project had the fun and interesting idea to take counsellors amenity groups, local representatives from employers or landowners on a bike ride and a walking tour of the High Street to get them to experience their area in a different way. And it was a fun one to deliver a bit challenging, but I thought wouldn’t it be great if we had more opportunities to do that to help bridge some of the very divisive positions that are currently exist around the place of the car in the city when many cities in the world, but also understand for move people to understand the place, the impact of the car on road safety all the way to carbon emissions.
Mailys Garden:
Thanks, Nico. That’s a really, really great story and actually it really leads into what we wanted to talk to you about today, which is rate safety and in particular Vision Zero. And for anyone who isn’t familiar with the expression Vision Zero and doesn’t know about that topic too much, perhaps you would be able to give us a bit of an introduction as to what that means.
Nico Bosetti:
So there’s a lot of things, I mean to bring to zero at the moment, but Vision Zero is a global initiative to get to zero deaths and or serious injuries resulting from road collisions. And it’s been adopted by many cities in the world, including London. And I guess I’ll speak a lot about London because this is where I’ve been working for most of the past 10 years. But Blackpool was actually the first British city to declare a Vision Zero target that was back in 2007. So they’ve been pioneers and in London it was introduced in 2018. And so the plan has been to eliminate all roads deaths and injuries, serious injuries from roads by 2041 with an interim milestone, which was in 2022. And the objective was that by 2022 there would be a 65% reduction in a number of people who are killed or seriously injured on London Streets compared to levels in 2005 to 2009. So that’s in a nutshell what we’re talking about.
Joe Tang:
That’s really interesting stuff and obviously it would be an absolutely amazing goal for London or any city to achieve, wouldn’t it? In terms of London’s progress so far, do you know how it’s doing against those targets?
Nico Bosetti:
So the latest progress report that we have received from Transport for London showed us that in 2019, London had reduced number of people killed or seriously injured by 39%. So if you remember the baseline, the aim for 2022 was 65% reduction, we’re at 39% in 2019. In 2020, we edged up to a reduction by 52%, so closer to the 65% reduction, but that was under pandemic road conditions. We don’t yet have the 2022 data, but it’s very likely that we have not reached the milestone we’re aiming for in 2022 of a 65% reduction simply because most people have been returning back to normal as we come out the pandemic. But that said, we have made good progress and I think we’ll talk about these shortly.
Mailys Garden:
So that’s really interesting to see this major ambition and then the interim milestones and how somehow progress is not quite catching up. With that ambition, Nico, I was wondering if you could maybe share some insights as to why you think that progress might be slowing down just now?
Nico Bosetti:
Yeah, so I mean maybe before we go into the kind of why it’s slowing, it might be worth touching on what’s been achieved in recent years and maybe we understand where we’re falling short, but I don’t want to play down that there’ve been some real achievements. Probably want to focus on four of them. The first one is bringing down speed limits on local and city roads to 20 miles per hour. It’s been done across the UK in London, many boroughs have been doing it and transport funding as well. And it’s really key to achieving Vision Zero is reducing vehicle speeds, but there’s still way to go on doing that. Even in London for instance. You’ve got about a third of boroughs which haven’t really done a comprehensive change to speed limits to reduce them. So I think that’s one first area for progress.
The second element where we’ve been successful is transfer for London’s programme to redesign all the accident hotspots in the city. And that’s providing street layout changes that will slow down speeding drivers improve visibility. And that’s, for example, elevated crossings, pedestrian priority crossings, roundabouts, pedestrian islands for intersections are really difficult to cross speed bumps and narrowed roadways that slow down vehicles. You could count into that the expansion of the network of Cycleways and quiet ways which provides safer routes for cycling or riding an e scooter and protect for mobile users in doing so.
And on that front, even though we’ve had an ambitious programme, as we all know, our roads were designed for the car in many places in the city and as well in the UK. And therefore that’s a programme that really needs to continue, especially in a context where we know transport [inaudible 00:09:06] this is short of funding to do this. The third aspect is safety standards for lorries. And there’s been an incredible progress here from Transport for London in effectively licencing the bigger vehicles that come into the city to make sure that they have really good visibility of their surrounding environment as much as it’s possible. And that vehicles that do not meet those minimum safety standards cannot operate in London. And that’s for instance, including windows on the sides so that a lower driver can see whether it’s being passed by a cyclist. And that’s been a real sea change I think.
Yeah, so I guess maybe where I could just comment is I touched upon it, but say where we still have a lot of way to go before reaching net-zero and death and serious injuries. We’ve talked about the fact that our roads and streets were designed for cars and to move as many cars as possible as quickly as possible. And this is something that we need to change to ensure that intersections are safe for pedestrians or cyclists. And we’ve talked a bit about staggered pedestrian crossings or places where there’s no pedestrian crossing at all and how you improve that. How do you widen pavement or provide advanced stopping lines for cyclists so that they can stop ahead of equals. I guess the big item that’s outstanding is compliance with speed limits because we can lower the speed limits all you like, but if compliance is patchy, then you’re going to struggle to reach Vision Zero.
And I think that’s understandable from a driver’s perspective that if a road has been designed to accommodate faster vehicle speeds and if they think that they’re unlikely to be caught speeding, then it’s very tempting to go faster than the speed limit. But of course you forget quickly that you are prone to human mistakes and that these mistakes are more likely to be deadly the faster you drive. And so while we can improve the way we check on speed limits and controls with not just cameras that measure speed at different places, but cameras that measure your average speed over a journey. So taking a photograph of your licence plate at different points and see if you have been going faster on the speed limit at all over that stretch, but beyond this and the kind of enforcement, you can’t monitor every street in the city. And therefore, that’s where we come back to design and designing for safer speeds.
Mailys Garden:
So I just wanted to comment in if that’s all right because I think that’s just really interesting what Nico is saying and when we look at the fastest slow progress of Vision Zero for the years that it’s been introduced, it feels like the sheer scale at which we need to implement as those changes just makes it difficult in the sense that possibly the lieu hanging fruits, the sort of lieu cost easy fixes have been done. And I think what you’re saying, Nico, is that they are having a really good positive impact now is more how it gets systematised across the entire city, isn’t it?
Nico Bosetti:
That’s the case for sure, and it’s expensive to change our high wheel layouts as we all know, but it’s got hugely positive impacts in terms of its safety. And then there’s another piece which we might not touch on today about reducing motor traffic where it’s possible and especially avoiding the instances where you’ve got bigger vehicles lorries at the same time as vulnerable users on the same piece of street or road. And that maybe is one of the ways that you can improve safety without rolling out this massive infrastructure investment to make roads safer, which we also need to do, but we’ll take time.
Joe Tang:
Absolutely will. I mean that’s all such interesting stuff, isn’t it, and such a huge wealth of factors to consider and to overcome for all the parties involved. Keeping all of that in mind and all those items that you’ve highlighted, Nico, what are your thoughts on whether you think getting to visions areas an achievable goal for London or I guess any other city in the world for that matter?
Nico Bosetti:
Well, that’s a very good question because some people are saying or have been thinking if the goal is to reach zero and London is slowing down that goal, is that a goal we should keep or should we ditch it? And actually there are cities that are proof of what can be achieved also in Helsinki have kind of both reached version zero at some point. No one was killed on the streets of either city in 2019 and in 2020 no one was killed on the roads in Helsinki and one person was killed in Oslo. So I think it shows you it’s a game definitely worth aiming for. And there’s two reasons for that. The first one is it’s doable. The second one is, if we don’t go for that aim, then what level of acceptable death and injuries on streets do we settle for? Is the fact that London is a very big city mean that we cannot achieve that goal? I don’t quite think so.
Mailys Garden:
Thank you. Thank you for saying that, Nico. I think a topic that we’ve slowly touched upon beyond the physical infrastructure investment is the role of technology to assist in monitoring and ensuring compliance on route safety and achieving Vision Zero. And obviously, technology and innovation and transport is a really big thing and it can be something that helps us. It can be something that is seen by some as an obstacle as well. And one of the changes that we’ve seen on city streets in Europe and in the world, particularly since the pandemic is the boom in e-bikes and e-scooters. And I wanted to get your thoughts on what do you perceive the impact as on helping us achieve or not Vision Zero in London?
Nico Bosetti:
Well, I think it’s worth setting out as a baseline that smaller vehicles such as e-bikes or e-scooters pose much, much less of a risk to other people than bigger ones. But it is true that electrification means that they can go faster and that in general, this is mostly a risk for their rider, which we definitely should be concerned about. But because they are quiet, it also can be a risk for other liberal users. So my thinking on this would be electric mobility and micromobility. So e-bikes and e-scooters really has a lot of potential to help people move around the city and avoid using cars or bigger vehicles which are bigger killers and therefore this is something that should be encouraged. Obviously, we should be encouraged these vehicles to be rid safely. There’s a slightly separate piece in that micro ability is increasingly being used for rapid deliveries.
Some would say instant deliveries and there probably is a piece of work to be done there to ensure that the rider incentives are to ensure safety for the delivery person and anyone around them instead of speed and speed of delivery. So safety trumping speed. But zooming out of the micromobility piece, there are several trends which are probably increasing risk on roads and that may be contributing to the fact that we are progressing more slowly towards Vision Zero. One of them is the increase in personal deliveries, which means there are more vans and lorries on London’s roads and roads in cities across the world.
I think it’s very much a global trend and the fact that people are also tend to be buying bulky, bigger cars like SUVs which are more dangerous to vulnerable users in a collision because they’re higher up so they’re more likely to eat, hit you in your upper body. And I think these are probably two focus areas for policy. So one of them is do we need those bigger cars? The other one is how can we ensure that if we continue to rely on deliveries and it’s likely that the trends will continue, we avoid hours on the road where we know there are a lot of vulnerable users on pedestrian cyclists commuting for instance, and try to through retiming kind of avoid as instances where we’ve got very big vehicles and vulnerable users in the same space.
Mailys Garden:
Thanks, Nico. I really like this zoom out actually to place Vision Zero in the context of the emerging trends and transport and urban logistics as well, which as you reminded us is a really big topic. But also going back to the core principles of transport planning where we have that pyramid of users and the hierarchy of modes where we place pedestrian walkers and wheelers at the very top of the user needs and how that is absolutely fundamental to achieving greater safety on London roads. And we’ll continue to be talking about micromobility and also emerging forms of transport at our next podcast with Rachel Murphy from [inaudible 00:19:28] UK joining us next time.
Joe Tang:
Absolutely. And that’ll be a really interesting one to take this discussion even further. Thank you very much for joining us today, Nico. Obviously safety is such a necessary area in all the work we do and often there’s a saying that those of us in the engineering team here are safety engineers first with a bit of a highway slant on it. And in essence, and there’s obviously, as you’ve highlighted, a huge amount of different areas and input, there’ll be needed for Vision Zero. Things like providing safer highways arrangements, filtering certain streets, enabling more cycling, walking, e mobility, public transport, and even the elements you touched upon there in terms of deliveries, cargo bikes, things like that. So yeah, huge amount to be considering on this end to help achieve a goal.
Nico Bosetti:
Thank you very much to both of you thriving me and to the producing team.
Mailys Garden:
So we hope that you listening enjoyed the conversation today. We’ll be keeping the conversations going on LinkedIn where you can find us at Momentum Transport Consultancy and Momentum Transport Canada, or follow our podcast to make sure you don’t miss any future episodes from all of us at Conversations in Momentum. Bye for now and we’ll see you next time.