January 2024 saw the launch of the highly anticipated draft Vision Zero Strategy: Reducing Road Danger in Greater Manchester.
Its ambition is for Greater Manchester to have zero fatalities and life changing injuries on our roads by 2040 whilst increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all.
I am supporting the Vision Zero aspiration for Greater Manchester (GM) after I promised to do so in my Active Travel Mission and because every death or serious injury on our roads is one too many. Not only are these collisions devastating people’s lives but they are leaving a long-lasting impact on the wider community and preventing other people from feeling safe when they are out and about on their own journeys.
Dame Sarah Story, GM Active Travel Commissioner
Vulnerable road users (those who are not protected inside a vehicle) accounted for nearly two thirds of those killed or seriously injured. Despite posing the lowest risk to others, pedestrians made up 31% of those killed or seriously injured on our roads.
An Action Plan is due to follow after the May 2024 local and mayoral elections.
In 2022, road casualties in GM cost nearly £500 million in medical, police, damage to property and insurance costs, lost output and human costs – which attempts to provide an economic value to the pain, grief and suffering caused by road collisions.
GM Vision Zero Strategy 2024
As ever is the case in England, London’s Vision Zero strategy preceded GM’s. Embedded within the Mayor’s Transport Strategy (2018), it aims to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries from London’s transport network by 2041.
The road safety charity Brake has called on the Government to deliver at the national level in order to achieve safe and healthy mobility for all by 2040.
Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all. First implemented in Sweden in the 1990s, Vision Zero has proved successful across Europe.
Vision Zero Network
Outside of the UK, Oslo, Norway and Helsinki, Finland reportedly reduced pedestrian fatalities to zero in 2019, largely thanks to taking action to curtail through traffic moving across its city centre.