Birmingham City Council launches new road safety strategy

Birmingham City Council has launched a new strategy aimed at tackling the ‘unacceptable number’ of road collisions in which people are killed and seriously injured. The Road Harm Reduction Strategy renews and reinforces the council’s commitment to Vision Zero – the campaign to eliminate deaths and serious injury. It aims to reduce the speed and number of motor vehicles on local streets, instead creating safer spaces to walk and cycle.

The strategy sets out the duties of the council and the role of partners such as the police and the West Midlands Combined Authority. It also introduces the internationally recognised Healthy Streets approach. The council says Healthy Streets is about designing streets on a human scale, giving priority to people rather than private vehicles.

This will see a shift to interventions across whole areas rather than smaller schemes in hotspot locations and a move away from traditional measures such as pedestrian guard railing and speed humps which ‘get in the way of people walking and cycling and are no longer delivering reductions in collisions and injuries’.

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