Safety first

At the very heart of the Live Labs 2 East Riding project is the focus “Reduce carbon in a way that makes our roads safer”. We understand that the idea of this project may raise concerns, with people thinking we are taking away or reducing lighting in key areas. In actual fact, a great deal of expert knowledge and research is going into the safety aspect of the work we are doing. The main thing to understand is that we are not just taking street lighting away for the sake of it, and we are certainly not proposing that any of these changes be made in residential areas. Our focus is on out of town roads and bypasses and we are replacing the street lighting with new materials such as:

• brighter white lines
• brighter signs
• different sign layouts
• illuminated road studs that show the layout of the road beyond driver headlights.

Research and risk assessments

Scientific research shows that drivers, on average, drive faster when there is light, whether this is daylight or streetlights. This is replicated in our own research so far. One of our very first tasks was to investigate the collision history for the last 10 years for both of the two test roads and, as you would expect, roundabouts, junctions, and crossroads all show a higher than average collision record. 80 per cent of these collisions happened during daylight hours.



To make sure our proposals and solutions will improve this statistic they have all undergone a road safety risk assessment. This assessment is the same we would undertake if we were changing the layout of the road or building a new one. Once the proposed solutions are in place, a road safety audit will be undertaken. This is the recognised national practice, and it is carried out before anything is switched on.

Backing up the research

Our biggest challenge is to prove any changes we make are safe in real life and proving it to both the public and industry professionals is key to the success of the project. To do this we have taken an existing system of traffic monitoring, used by councils across the country, and we’ve supercharged it. We have deployed, at most of the main test sites, several thermal imaging CCTV cameras that use AI to monitor and record, amongst other things:

• vehicle types
• speeds
• braking
• lane position
• near misses.

This standalone system is only for data capture and analysis, and it is key to proving our success. No personal information, such as vehicle ownership details, is collected. This is the first system in the world deploying thermal imaging cameras rather than optical cameras that only work in daylight or under street lights. Our system works in both lit and dark conditions and captures the same data whether it’s 2pm or 2am.

We will be collecting this data before we make any changes to the road to obtain a baseline of how drivers behave in these complex locations. We will then generate the data in real time, once we switch from streetlights to the new proposed solutions. This data will be monitored closely and reported on at regular intervals.

We have brought in road safety officers and insurers to evaluate our proposals and they have been approved, but we’re aiming for further positive results. There are huge carbon savings to be made by taking this approach, but the data provided by our cutting-edge systems is also aiming to prove that this change away from how it has always been done can keep our roads safe, if not safer than before.

Improving standards

Our aim is to prove that the British Standards that govern road construction are outdated and not keeping up with modern technology and all it can offer. Street lighting has always been thought of as the ultimate road safety intervention, but data shows that collisions happen whether it's light or not.

This project aims to be pioneering for local authorities and provide more options when assessing safety measures for roads. These options don’t involve carbon hungry solutions, and work for both the users and the planet.