22nd Westminster Lecture

Post Event Writeup

In her lecture, Dr Anable took a very wide canvas attempting to bring together the road safety and sustainability agendas. She argued that road safety had achieved substantial behaviour change through both encouragement and regulation. Sustainable travel choices, however, had only encouragement as a means of achieving change. In the current climate road safety would need to achieve more through encouragement given the unwillingness of legislators to regulate further.

Secondly, she argued that "nudging" means getting people to make the right choice subliminally. Advertising and publicity are not examples of nudging since they are a positive intervention to achieve change.

Thirdly, she pointed to the need to align casualty and carbon reduction arguments when dealing with proposals to raise the motorway speed limit. Rather than focusing on the options available to individual drivers, the government should aim for better network management which would increase capacity, improve safety and tackle emissions caused by faster driving.

A written text of the lecture will be available in the New Year. As the presentation is a large one, the slides have been saved in two separate files.