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Case Study

Gloucester Safer City

Tools Involved

• Public Transport Priority;
• Speeding Detection;
• Vulnerable Road User Facilities.

Site Description

The DfT's £5m 'Gloucester Safer City' project ran from April 1996 to March 2001, with a further year of evaluation once the project was complete. The project aimed to prove the benefits of applying Urban Safety Management (USM) across an entire urban area.

Site Problems

Cities and large towns suffer serious accidents on their roads on a daily basis (for a population of 100,000 there are approximately 500 road casualties per year). The DfT chose Gloucester for its safer city study due to the City's suitable size, isolation from other large conurbations and variety of road layouts.

Scheme Description

The project included the introduction of:

• vertical deflection (speed table, speed hump and speed cushions);
• mandatory and advisory cycle lanes;
• reduced wait times for pedestrian crossings;
• transponders at traffic lights to give bus priority;
• road safety presentations (offered as an alternative to a fixed penalty for speeding drivers); and
• ANPR speed enforcement cameras (monitoring a vehicle's average speed between two points).

Scheme Objectives

The main objective of the Gloucester Safer City project was to improve road safety by using a combination of USM across the whole city. This improvement aimed to show other authorities the potential benefits of adopting USM in their town or city.

Improvements

The system has been shown to:

• reduce road injury accidents and casualties;
• reduce speeds (even slightly in non-treated areas); and
• reduce general traffic noise.

Integrated Systems

The transponders providing priority to buses at traffic lights could be linked to a real time information system to monitor bus performance and provide passengers with dynamic bus timetables.

Costs

Capital cost £5m, unknown revenue costs.

Benefits

Benefits are shown in the table below.

Actual benefits reported
Impact Assessment	Environment	Significant reductions in emissions occurred, but not as a result of the project. No significant changes were recorded on links where traffic management measures were implemented.
	Accessibility	No benefits expected or reported
	Safety	Net reduction in injury accidents of around 24%Sig Net reduction in fatal and serious injuries of around 37% (48.1 reduction in Gloucester and 17.7% reduction in control towns)Sig Accident rates were 55% lower than expected where traffic signals, toucan crossings and roundabouts were installed.Sig
	Efficiency	No benefits expected or reported
	Integration	No benefits expected or reported
Technical Performance		No technical problems reported.
User Acceptance		83% rated speed camera introduction favourably.

Gloucester Safer City benefits table (Sig implies that result was significant at the 95% confidence level).

(source: TRL Report 589 Gloucester Safer City: Final Report Mackie and Wells 2003)

No attempt has been made to validate the results reported. Users of the guidance are encouraged to assess the robustness of the results presented and the likely transferability of the case study to their own local environment.