Skip to main content

Road Safety Trust to fund pilot scheme to reduce tailgating

Transport & Travel Research (TTR) and parent company Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) have secured funding for a pilot scheme to reduce tailgating by business drivers from the Road Safety Trust, a charity that funds research to support its objective of reducing road casualties. TTR is now seeking interest from potential local authority partners that would act as a host for the pilot in their area. Tailgating, or close following, is a widespread concern on UK roads. It makes drivers feel intimidated,
July 5, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
Transport & Travel Research (TTR) and parent company Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) have secured funding for a pilot scheme to reduce tailgating by business drivers from the Road Safety Trust, a charity that funds research to support its objective of reducing road casualties. TTR is now seeking interest from potential local authority partners that would act as a host for the pilot in their area.

Tailgating, or close following, is a widespread concern on UK roads. It makes drivers feel intimidated, aggravates congestion and is a contributory factor in seven per cent of collisions says the 1837 Department for Transport in its Reported Road Casualties Great Britain: 2014 report.

According to the road safety charity Brake, 44 per cent of drivers are concerned about close-following most times that they drive on motorways; however, nearly 60 per cent of drivers admit to leaving less than the recommended two-second gap between themselves and the vehicle in front.

The project will focus on business drivers because on average they undertake high annual driving mileages and are involved in a quarter of road traffic collisions.

Practical interventions may focus on education, engineering or enforcement approaches or a combination of these.

The TTR and TRL team is now looking for local authority partners to work with them to recruit employers within the pilot area and develop a package of behaviour change techniques to measure and influence attitudes towards close-following.

Related Content

  • April 20, 2017
    Increased automation is already improving road safety
    Richard Cuerden considers how many of the technologies developed as part of a move toward autonomous vehicles are already being deployed as ADAS improve road safety. The drive to create autonomous vehicles has caused a re-evaluation of what is needed to safely navigate today’s roads and the development of systems that can replace the driver in many scenarios. However, many manufacturers are not waiting for ‘tomorrow’ and are already incorporating these systems in their new cars as Advanced Driver Assistanc
  • January 23, 2012
    Changing driving conditions need ongoing driver training
    Trevor Ellis, chairman of the ITS UK Enforcement Interest Group, considers the role of ongoing driver training in increasing compliance. It is over 30 years since I passed my driving test. The world was quite a different place then, in that there were only half the vehicles there are now on the UK's roads, mobile phones did not really exist and (in the UK at least) the vast majority of us drove cars which by today's standards exhibited dreadful dynamic stability and were woefully underpowered.
  • January 30, 2012
    Road design as a primary aid to speed enforcement?
    Letty Aarts, senior researcher, SWOV institute for road safety research, the Netherlands, discusses how road design can act as a primary aid to speed enforcement
  • November 28, 2014
    Road safety award for average speed scheme
    A route enforcement and casualty reduction scheme on the strategic A14 in the UK has won a prestigious Prince Michael International Road Safety Award. The A14 route between the Midlands and East Anglia operates at the national speed limit of 70mph as a dual carriageway with central reserve and no hard shoulder. The average annual daily traffic figure is 74,000 and with no motorways or other high standard diversion routes along this corridor, journeys can be seriously delayed when congestion or collisio