Updates to the Highway Code, One Year On: What do the experts say?

It’s been a long road to get the UK’s Highway Code updated with improved rules for cyclist safety. Back in 2017, Chris Boardman handed a petition to the UK Government (this was when Theresa May was in charge) requesting updated rules for safer junctions. By 2018, possible specifics were emerging, like the incorporation of ‘Dutch Reach‘ into the code. In early 2022, three Prime Ministers after Boardman handed over his petition, the Highway Code was duly changed, but it seems that the hard work is not over, not least in publicising the changes to the nation’s drivers.

Should changes to the Highway Code and how it impacts UK cyclists matter to the cycling industry? CyclingIndustry.News’ own market studies are not alone in linking safety and the perception of safety of cycling on the roads with the numbers of people willing to get on (and buy/repair hire) bicycles, so the matter is nothing less than existential.

Our own Simon Cox has examined the impact of the changes and now we hand over to regular CyclingIndustry.News contributor Sean Meager, who has been following the story and sat in on the APPGCW’s in-depth evaluation of how successful the Highway Code changes have been…

Andy Cox, DCS: “It felt to me, police, and colleagues, it was a significant event and significant launch but it hasn’t been followed up and therefore it starts be diluted.”

“We welcome the changes to the Highway Code but [are here to discuss] the fact that there’s an issue of the publicity of [them],” says Ruth Cadbury, Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth. Cadbury is opening a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Cycling and Walking — a committee she co-chairs with the Conservative MP Selaine Saxby.

As the name group’s name suggests, the APPG for Cycling and Walking is a cross-Parliamentary body with the aim of getting more people cycling and walking and to use their influence as Parliamentarians to promote all forms of cycling and walking.

We observed a meeting of the committee, streamed online, which took place on 20 March 2023; a year and two months after the government implemented changes to the Highway Code. In this meeting, the committee and interested stakeholders hear from experts on what effects the changes to the highway Code of 2022 have had in the year since their implementation.

The meeting, chaired by Cadbury and Saxby, heard accounts from a range of specialists, including Duncan Dollimore, Head of Campaigns at Cycling UK; Edmund King, President of the AA; Detective Chief Superintendent Andy Cox, Met Police (in his role as National Lead for Fatal Crash Investigation); Rachel Botterill, Senior Associate Solicitor at Leigh Day; and Shaun Helman, Chief Behavioural Scientist at the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).

Conspicuously absent from the meeting was a representative from the Department for Transport. We’re informed by Cadbury, in her opening remarks, that disappointingly, the DfT representative had to pull out of the meeting one hour before it was scheduled to take place, which is a shame, as “The Highway Code is in a sense theirs to own and promote,” says Cadbury. The DfT have been invited to comment on the absence.

The Legal Perspective: Rachel Botterill, Leigh Day Solicitors

The first update is from Rachel Botterill, a Senior Associate Solicitor at Leigh Day solicitors (a corporate partner of the APPGCWG). Rachel’s area of specialty is personal injury cases, particularly those involving pedestrians and cyclists. Rachel acts on behalf of cyclists pursing civil actions, after they’ve been involved in traffic accidents.

In her presentation, titled “Are we seeing any positive or negative patterns emerging from a legal perspective, as result of the changes to HC?” Rachel outlines some of the key areas that, from a legal perspective, that have been affected the Highway Code changes.

Following a collision with a motorist, a cyclist or pedestrian can instruct a solicitor to make a claim against the driver of the vehicle. If a claim is made, the solicitor will spend time investigating the incident first before deciding whether issue court proceedings.

When acting on behalf a client, a lawyer will send a pre-action letter of Claim to set out their preliminary allegations of negligence and which provisions of the Highway Code they will be relying on most heavily. It is this stage that Rachel tells the Committee that they have seen a benefit to the new provisions.

The primary benefit from Rachel’s perspective is the clarification of certain rules, which has helped solicitors set out their cases more clearly.

For example, rule 140 made it expressly clear that “You MUST NOT drive or park in a cycle lane marked by a solid white line during its times of operation. Do not drive or park in a cycle lane marked by a broken white line unless it is unavoidable. You MUST NOT park in any cycle lane whilst waiting restrictions apply.” Crucially, the updated provision also made it “clear cyclists are not obliged to use cycle lanes or cycle tracks.” This has been useful, Rachel tells the Committee, because “In the past cyclists have been penalised for not using an available cycle lane.” Penalised, in this case, meaning being awarded less compensation that they ought to have been.

Rule 163 has made it clear that motorists “should … give motorcyclists, cyclists, and horse riders and horse drawn vehicles at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car.” It specifies that this should be at least 1.5 metres when overtaking cyclists at speeds of up to 30 mph, and more when speeds are higher. Rachel says, “It’s been helpful to have clear guidance on the safe distance for passing.”

Wording in rule 72 provides two roads positions you should adopt when riding on the roads. Depending on the situation you should either “Ride in the centre of your lane” or “keeping at least 0.5 metres away … from the kerb edge”. Positioning continues into rule 73 on junctions, where riders are advised to “Position yourself in the centre of your chosen lane, where you feel able do this safely”. Rachel says, “[these] are really valuable bits of wording that we can use,” she continued; “We often face criticism from defendants when cyclists have been riding in the middle of the road or two abreast. We know as cyclists that they’re doing that to protect themselves and now we’ve got the ammunition to come back at any defendant that tries to challenge that.”

One rule that doesn’t appear to have had a marked affect yet is rule 239. Rule 239 makes it clear “you MUST ensure you do not hit anyone when you open your door [aside — who knew that needed to be a rule!] … where you are able to do so, you should open the door using your hand on the opposite side to the door you are opening.” This manoeuvre is frequently referred to as the ‘Dutch reach’ and helps to avoid ‘car dooring’. Unfortunately, Rachel says, “We’re still seeing these case and the fact we’re still seeing these cases suggest the message isn’t filtering through yet.”

Other rules that have proved useful in legal practice are: rule 151 (on filtering through traffic); 178 (which states drivers must stop at the first line when there is an advance stop line); 186 (on giving cyclists priority at roundabouts); and the establishment of the Hierarchy of Road Users. The latter provision, says Rachel, is particularly helpful when incidents have occurred on narrow roads when there aren’t any witnesses.

What it is difficult to say, at least in the experience of Leigh Day’s solicitors, is how effective these provisions will be when tested in court. It can take multiple years for court proceedings to be issued, as such Leigh Day have not had been able to test strength of the new provisions in the courts.

Overall, Rachel concludes, “We only see things when they have gone wrong,” she continues, “but we feel positive about the changes. Undoubtedly, they are helping us set out our cases in the civil system. We have seen a reduction in the number of cases coming in since the changes. But that could be masked by increased inability to bring a claim, so we would need to report back in a year or two.

The Cycling Campaigner’s Perspective: Duncan Dollimore, Cycling UK

Duncan Dollimore is next up to present. Duncan is Head of Campaigns at Cycling UK, a charitable organisation committed to promoting cycling across the UK. “Cycling UK have campaigned and lobbied for the changes [to the Highway Code] for more than 10 years,” Duncan tells the committee, “so, we were delighted when the changes came through.”

Unfortunately, a year on from the culmination of a decade’s worth of lobbying and Duncan can see that the work is far from over. “I wish I could be a little bit more positive on the impact we thought [the changes were] having on the behaviour on the road,” he says, “Unfortunately, there is an absence of data, or even anecdotal information, to say that [the changes] are having much impact yet. I say the word ‘yet’ because I think it’s a crucially important one, because we remain of the view that these changes have the potential to be very positive.”

In order to see improvements to cycling safety on the road, Duncan tells the committee, “We always needed four things with these rules”:

• To change the rules … “Which we’ve got, and we think they’re excellent”.
• Communicate the changes themselves … “We don’t think we’ve had enough of that yet”.
• Communicate the rationale for the changes … “We’ve definitely not had that yet”.
• A consistent approach to roads policing and enforcement … “There are some pockets of excellence in relation to that, but I think there’s still some work to do in terms of filtering that through into how things are consistently dealt with across forces.”

From Cycling UK’s own polling of road users on the changes, Duncan says “we didn’t find much improvement” on knowledge and understanding of the changes to the rules from January 2022 to January 2023. Continuing, Duncan says, “Even when people said they knew there had been some changes, their knowledge and accuracy of the changes was pretty poor.”

Duncan does offer “huge credit to DfT for pushing through some changes which some thought were controversial,” and praises the messaging in the “travel like you know them” campaign. “This is a very good message,” he says unequivocally.

However, he does level some criticism at DfT: “Our concern is in relation to the resources being given to the THINK! [the government’s overarching road-safety awareness] team to actually push these changes out. [We all] know the consequences of fatalities on our roads cannot be measured in financial terms alone. But, if you’ll forgive me, just to deal with the pure financial cost, the DfT [estimate for] every death on the road is a £2.1 million loss and we have over 1,600 [deaths] on the road each year. And yet, the budget to communicate these changes is less than that, by a substantial amount, and I think that goes to the core of the lack of resource that’s been given to communicate the changes.”

“There’s still a misunderstanding about the rules,” says Duncan, “The changes can’t just be communicated as one rule, it’s a contextual thing as to why these changes were necessary.” This concept of an overarching message is re-iterated later by Shaun Helman who presents the government’s decades-long drink-drive communications campaigns as an example.

“There hasn’t been enough of involving people in some of these changes and the consequence of that is we’ve had information that’s been effectively given to people or assimilated by people by media coverage and that’s not always particularly helpful because it’s led to some polarised media coverage and polarised discussions,” says Duncan.

Duncan’s last words for the committee are a plea: “One final plea from me … We need ministers in the DfT actively supporting and talking about the rationale for these changes. It’s sometimes felt over the course of the last year that it’s fallen to representative bodies (like Cycling UK) to justify the changes. It would be nice to see the government shouting about something they’ve achieved themselves. They deserve credit for bringing these in. But it does need someone to say, ‘we did this because of this, and these could be the benefits.”

The Motoring Perspective: Edmund King OBE, AA President

“For those questioning why someone from the Automobiles Association might be talking about cycling,” Edmund King, President of the AA, opens his allotted time with, “I have long interest in cycling, since my mother bought my first Raleigh bike for £5 from the founder of Lotus cars.”

“The AA was involved in the consultation before the changes and were broadly very supportive of the changes originally,” Edmund tells the committee; “The one area we did question, to be fair, when it first came out, was on cars turning left and giving way to pedestrians. Because there was no clarification on the type of road and [we had] some questions on whether it should be on fast moving roads.”

“In terms of the hierarchy of road users, we were very supportive. We even tried to educate the media, that included GB News. Some of their presenters, including Anne Diamond, were very cynical about it and thought the AA would be up in arms about it, but we managed to put them right there,” says Edmund. Continuing, he said, “More recently, with the [Cycling UK] survey which found that 33% of people were unaware of those changes and had no intention of reading them, we about some positive messaging out there.”

“A year on, there are some positive things going on,” claims Edmund. For example, AA driving schools and BSM now have a module on the new Highway Code. “So, all learner drivers, at the very least, are actually getting well educated,” he says.

Edmund also presented some AA survey findings, conducted in conjunction with YouGov. The poll questioned 12,545 drivers between 13 and 20 September 2022. According to these results, over 90% of respondents did know that the Highway Code had changed to increase safety for cyclists. 40% of drivers said they were more mindful of cyclists than they were a year ago, though 23% and 37% were not or neither respectively.

However, while some positive results of the survey were presented, some of the questioning in the survey leaves little to be desired. For example, “Rule 66. Be considerate of the needs of other road users when cycling in groups. Two abreast can be safer particularly in larger groups or accompanying children or less experienced riders..be [sic] aware of drivers behind you and allow them to overtake.. when [sic] you feel it is safe to do so etc Do you agree?”  With the options being, “Yes”, “No”, or “Don’t know”. According to Edmund, 81% of respondents agreed with this. But to our reading, it is not clear whether you’d be agreeing with two abreast being safe for children, less experienced riders, or with the sentiment that cyclists should ‘allow [drivers] to overtake’.

Edmund concludes his presentation with a reminder that the AA Charitable Trust was instrumental in launching the “Think Bikes” campaign. This campaign involved providing stickers motorists could stick to the wing mirrors to remind them to be extra cautious about checking for bikes when out on the road.

Policing Perspective: Andy Cox, Met Police/National Policing

Andy Cox is representing National Policing not the Met. Cox starts by saying, “There have been some marked changes, to be fair. We really sign up and agree with changes to the Highway Code, in particular hierarchy, positioning — both on the road and at junctions — and the Dutch reach. [These are four things] we find are most beneficial now, both as a deterrent and in enforcement.”

“[But the issue of deaths on the road] is far wider than the Highway Code. For example, legislation around ‘exceptional hardship’ and enforcement of pre-crash issues such as extreme speeding, so I think there’s need to have a broader look, to be fair.”

From a policing perspective, DCS Cox has some positive comments. “I think the 1.5 metre clarity has been really really beneficial. In terms of marketing, I think that really did get people talking and did have an impact.”

Where Cox is less positive is on the continuing re-marketing of the changes. “What are we doing to re-market that?” he asks; “How do we continue to build on that initial hit, when people did talk about them and it did have an impact. Because people forget and it only stays with them for so long.”

For Cox, “We’ve got to constantly reinforce [the changes]”, but he continues, “[I] don’t really see, if I’m being honest, an effective marketing campaign around that…There’s lots of talking around it in certain networks but I think more broadly people soon forget and perhaps have.”

Despite his initial positivity, Cox’s comments turn to be less reassuring: “From an enforcement perspective, we don’t really see a change … In terms of the hierarchy and positioning, this actually led to some difficulties between drivers and cyclists from a cultural perspective. When a cyclist does take the centre ground, if the driver’s not aware the HC has changed or doesn’t sign up to it or buy into it, it arguably creates more risk.”

The main issue, from Cox’s perspective, is “a fundamental cultural challenge around the way we drive.” He says, “There are too many people prepared to do an overtake which is far too dangerous. They then wait at the junction, they wait at the red light, the cyclist catches them up, and it goes on and on and on. I think until we really fundamentally deal with that, this will always be an issue.”

The solution for Cox is much broader than simply changes to the Highway Code. “[The HC is] just one pocket of a much bigger picture around legislation, around the wider marketing, the media and the role they play,” he says, “and a much bigger, more collaborative joined up stakeholder engagement to really tackle road danger.”

Overall, from a national policing perspective, Cox tells the committee, “We really sign up to [the Highway Code changes]. We agree. We like them,” but he goes on to conclude; “But we recognise there’s so much more to it that needs to take effect. I think the points being made around the government influence and government voice … [there’s] emotional impact with 111 people dying, so it’s how we get that across, continue to market that, continue to push for other changes, and to make people constantly aware by constantly reinforcing it. It felt to me, police, and colleagues, it was a significant event and significant launch but it hasn’t been followed up and therefore it starts be diluted.”

The Scientist’s Perspective: Shaun Helman, Chief Scientist TRL (Transport Research Laboratory)

The final presentation of the meeting is delivered by Shaun Helman, the Chief Scientist at the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL). Shaun specialises in Behavioural Sciences, with a particular focus on transport. He has nearly two decades of experience in road safety, road user behaviour, and human-technology integration.

His presentation begins similarly positively to the others. “I’d like to say upfront and clearly these changes [to the highway code] are really positive and certainly the TRL welcomes them from that perspective,” Shaun opens with.

However, while he strikes an optimistic tone, Shaun is clear that his “presentation is intended to be a sort of a reality check on what we can hope to achieve with what’s been done so far … This is a longer game than maybe we first thought.”

Using a logic model — a model that describes a chain of causes and effects that will achieve a desired outcome — Shaun says, “[the] problem we’re talking about is vulnerable road user safety,” he continues, “we hope that by telling people some new information that that will prompt those people to go and learn that information and use it in their behaviour on the road. And that’s essentially all we’re hoping to achieve here.”

Though it’s a simple assertion, “the assumptions underpinning it … are difficult to achieve,” says Shaun, “Often in road safety, we find that when we’re trying to do things like this, telling people stuff … is quite easy. It’s the getting them to use the information, learn, and change their behaviour that is not. If learning is hard, behaviour change is even harder.”

Shaun demonstrates this with a simple example. “Even if we have perfect knowledge, we still don’t have perfect behaviour,” he says; just look at speed limits. Fairly recently, TRL conducted a study in which they asked people what are the speed limits of built up areas and on motorways. “We find that for those two road types, knowledge is pretty much 100%,” Shaun tells the committee, “almost everybody that you ask will know those limits.”

However, when the TRL looked at free flow vehicle data, they found that half of people are breaking those limits, which most of them have knowledge of. “This is a simple illustration to show that’s it about more than telling and learning it’s about achieving that behaviour change,” says Shaun.

“These great changes to the Highway Code and the communication of them are first steps,” says Shaun. “There’s much more support needed to get movement on getting people to do the basic behaviour that we need, which is to read in detail about the changes, and retain that information, and hopefully change their behaviour on the road.”

To wrap up his presentation, Shaun offers some sobering (couldn’t resist) reflections on the decades long drink drive campaigns, that started in the 1970s. Over the course of three decades, various campaigns were run, which fit into distinct periods, each targeting a range of different behaviour change mechanisms. In turn, these focussed on a range of different strategies for the communications of themselves.

The drink drive campaigns, “[were] really a complex set of communications that took place over a three-decade period,” says Shaun. Over the course of the timeline presented, it can be seen that from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, those reporting that they drink drive steadily declined. “For males in the 1970s it was around 51%,” says Shaun, “and by the time the survey data ends at the end of the 1990s it was 23%.” This steady decline is supported by recorded rates of incidents in which someone is killed or seriously injured that involve a drunk driver.

Shaun’s summation certainly strengthens the idea that this is a marathon and not a sprint, though he seems optimistic it is a race that can be won. “Because of a really complex campaign over 30 years,” Shaun says, “you’ve seen a reduction but not an elimination of the behaviour that you’re wanting to change.” The conclusion is that “we need to reset our expectation here about what can be achieved. This is just the start and there needs to be a lot more effort to move forward in supporting the learning that we need to happen and the behaviour change.”

Question and Answer

To conclude proceedings, Selaine Saxby MP, the co-chair, read out some questions. Two of the more notable questions and answers were.

Is now the time to introduce regular mandatory re-testing, say every five years, to ensure every driver is safe to be in charge of a motor vehicle?

Andy Cox: “if we’re serious about change … then we would recognise the need to re-test. I don’t quite know the timeline, that would be a real complex piece of work to work out. But if we’re serious about making that change, we do have to put some form of additional refresher driver training standards testing into policy because actually it’s about saving lives and the economic benefit. I think there is opportunities to do that. It might come as you get older, or we could look at phasing it in earlier. But I think there certainly is some need to re-test.”

How can we change attitude/behaviour of aggressive drivers towards cyclists?

Shaun Helman: “There’s a whole range of reasons people behave in the way they do on the roads. Not just with the frustration people might experience when they feel they’ve been held up when they’re trying to get somewhere but also a whole set of social psychology things around in-groups and out-groups. People naturally have a tendency to want to belong to a certain group.”

“It’s a really big question. I personally think it comes back to something like a more comprehensive version of the drink drive change that we’ve seen. And that is a change of the way that people look at the culture of road use. That is getting people to a place to consider the roads as a shared space and basically to be nicer to each other. That’s what you’re aiming for. And you don’t get it from this piecemeal approach of just having courses for this and training for that, you have to bring it all together under a single vision. I don’t have the answer at to you would achieve that, but I suggest it is a really really big job and something we should be looking to achieve over the coming decades, especially as transport changes out of all recognition with new modes and new shared services, and all these kinds of things which are going to come into the mix. It is a behaviour change thing. It’s also a system change thing, designing the system differently on top of that.”