Firstly, we joined with fifteen professional road safety organisations in submitting a joint memorandum for its inquiry. The memorandum highlights the importance of targets for road safety which help to deliver higher levels of reductions in those countries that have set targets than in those that have not. The memorandum also calls for a new duty to be placed on the Secretary of State for Transport to ensure the safety of roads in Great Britain and to publish an action plan outlining the steps proposed to reduce road casualties.

At the heart of the committee’s inquiry will be an examination of the Key Outcome Indicators (KOIs) that have been proposed within the strategic framework.  As a leading analytical organisation who have introduced a number of new approaches to road safety research, RSA has submitted a secondary piece of evidence that deals with the KOIs in particular.

RSA has sought to highlight a number of key opportunities where the currently identified set of KOIs are deficient & yet have the potential to deliver so much more as part of the Government’s intention to empower citizens through the provision of performance data. By utilising the latest in analytical techniques to examine resident risk, local communities could be given greater insight into the issues that they face together and policy makers can be tasked with effectively addressing the inequalities that are introduced through deprivation. Utilising a broader data set rather than a limited focus on death rates at the national level will ensure that underlying trends are more likely to emerge rather than being masked by a narrow analysis. Disagregating collisions on local roads from those on the strategic road network is likely to provide better insight into the performance of local authorities and, whilst the new focus on rate based measures is welcomed, these rates need to be sharpened if they are to provide serious and meaningful measures of road risk.

To see the full submission, please download it from here.

First independent analysis using new Department for Transport Key Outcome Indicators reveals huge variations in road safety risk across the country

Road Safety Analysis reveals today how local road safety performance has differed across the country over the last five years[1]; this information is now available to the public and local authorities via an interactive mapping tool, or as a league table of performance.

The results reveal that per head of population, casualty rates are four times higher in the Borough of Westminster, North Yorkshire and Powys than in areas such as Plymouth, East Dunbartonshire and Torfaen.

Analysis of casualties based on traffic rates highlight Lambeth, Blackpool and the Isle of Wight as performing up to five times worse than South Gloucestershire, West Berkshire and Newport.

The research is based on five years’ data during which time over 150,000 people have been Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI Casualties) on Great Britain’s roads.  The results are expressed as rates, depending on local traffic and population counts, enabling a more accurate comparison of risk to be made for the first time.

The Department for Transport states that these indicators have been, “designed to help Government, local organisations and citizens to monitor the progress towards improving road safety and decreasing the number of fatalities and seriously injured casualties on Great British roads”, and therefore this report marks the first step in this process.

This study has been conducted by Road Safety Analysis a year after their ground-breaking, “Child Casualties 2010”[2] report which attracted widespread attention around the country[3].  This new report uses information derived from the award-winning[4] MAST Online collision analysis system, used by road safety professionals nationwide.

The mapping technology deployed to present the information has been licenced from international experts in online GIS solutions, eSpatial, and is an exciting preview of the new MAST Mapping service to be rolled out to MAST Members in the autumn.

Richard Owen, director of Road Safety Analysis says, “The results of this study show a worrying discrepancy between different parts of the country. Road users in some areas experience considerably higher risk from road traffic crashes than others who might be living just over the border.  With the help of this sort of information, Local Authorities can develop a much better understanding of the risks experienced by their residents and road users, helping them to address the inequalities that many people are experiencing.”

For a copy of the full results including a breakdown of casualty rates for all 206 highway authorities, visit our mapping page: http://www.roadsafetyanalysis.org/mapping/

New Mosaic

With the latest release we have integrated ‘New’ Mosaic Public Sector; a complete redesign of the Mosaic classification system that seeks to reflect some of the radical changes in British society over recent years.  New Mosaic has been designed to more responsive to some of the emerging issues that are reshaping society now and will continue to do so for years to come:

Population – the population is changing with a particular shift in the age profile of the population, but also in lifestyle choices and mobility across the generations.

Diversity – population migration can have a significant impact on a place for a range of reasons; understanding the impact of increased diversity in a locality in relation to road risk is very important for practitioners.

Networked Society – expansion of access to internet technologies is changing relationships between individuals and the organisations that serve them; our industry needs to be responsive to these changes in order to communicate in an increasingly networked society.

Economic change- economic conditions influence mobility, social integration, educational expectations, local community priorities, security and transport choice.

Geographic Trends – regional variation is likely to be an area of increased scrutiny where exogenous geographic trends such as employment, economic growth, types of industry and connectivity could be impacting on the transport network and reflected in road risk.

To support this Experian say that they have focussed on four areas in the development of new Mosaic:

1. Understanding key changes in society
2. Optimising the data
3. Clustering
4. Interpretation & validation

But what does that really mean for MAST users?

Underpinning Mosaic are billions of data items about nearly 25 million households and over 48 million adults.  This data, extracted from both public and commercial sources, provides information on geographic, demographic, economic, onomastic and lifestyle attributes reflected in society.  The new classification has introduced a better age model, identified new family structures, reflected a more detailed understanding of ethnicity and transience and improved the quality of residential property and indebtedness data.

Mosaic now includes 441 data items selected for every person, household, postcode and Output Area in the UK; 62% is person, household or postcode level 38% is Census Output Area or above.  These data sets and differing geographies are then clustered so that the classification can be meaningful when viewed at different levels.

To check that all of this work adds up to meaningful descriptions of communities, the data is rounded out with survey data on issues such as products, attitudes, technology and media, leisure, meanwhile street level work was undertaken to facilitate the renewed association of neighbourhoods to their respective Mosaic classification.

All of this work has led to a number of neighbourhoods being much more tightly defined than in the previous version, particularly where they are communities of the very wealthy, reflect an older age population, are ethnically diverse, have seen redeployment of housing stock or are on the rural margins of Britain.

Remember: Neighbourhood matters!

As Professor Richard Webber points out, Neighbourhood matters for a variety of reasons:

• Neighbourhoods self-select people who will find it easy to fit in
• Neighbourhoods influence what is felt to be acceptable behaviours among their residents
• Neighbourhoods provide different opportunities for spending time and money
• Neighbourhood reflect the importance of “taste” & “symbols” of success

So Neighbourhood becomes an extremely good way of identifying groups of people who share values, lifestyle choices and personal characteristics. This knowledge allows road safety professionals to identify neighbourhoods with a particular risk profile and target messages and interventions that reflect the aspirations and values of the residents in seeking to nudge their behaviour.

The effect of the work that has been undertaken with the data is that New Mosaic has expanded the number of groups from 11 to 15 and the number of types from 61 to 69, every one of which you can read about in the Wiki.

New Pen Portraits

The second major change that we have introduced to reflect the inclusion of New Mosaic is the inclusion of bespoke portraiture. With the previous version of Mosaic, the pen portraits that accompanied each group and type were very broad as they sought to provide background for a wide range of public service delivery providers.

In order to increase the clarity and focus of the pen portraits we commissioned a bespoke set that include data sets were not previously available to MAST users.

Whilst an overview of key features, rankings and regional distribution are retained other data variables come to the fore. Cars per household, travel to work, experience of speeding traffic and dangerous driving in the community appear alongside the all-important communications preferences and media consumption data; including internet usage.

Why Change Now?

New Mosaic was first unveiled by Experian in 2009, so you might be wondering why have we waited; why we are changing now?

Firstly, because we have been trying to build MAST with a substantial and reliable data set that utilises several years’ worth of data.  As much of the road casualty data is ‘historic’ the best Mosaic classification to match it against was inevitably offered by the Mosaic classification that was in place at the time of the incidents being analysed. Not until we had a couple of years’ worth of New Mosaic data to match against did we feel confident to introduce it as the dominant classification system.

Secondly, because we have gathered a pool of users from a wide range of disciplines and areas of expertise, many of whom had little experience of either analytical or social marketing work.  We wanted to allow a reasonable period for users to get familiar with the MAST approach to road user analysis and using the Mosaic classification before we launched an entirely new version on them.

Retaining ‘Old Mosaic’

So New Mosaic will, we trust, bring new insights, more detailed study and more targeted interventions, but to aid the transition we have also retained the old classification system for users too.

If you want to cross check previous analysis or refer to the older version because it allows you to communicate in language that your colleagues and stakeholders are more conversant with, do not worry, it’s all still in there, just check out the wiki for he ‘How To’ information you need.

The majority of the new features have been implemented as a result of the extensive consultation with MAST members which began with the 2011 User Group meeting in February.  This reflects the commitment of the MAST team to improve and develop the tool in line with user’s requirements.

Reflecting on the new latest release, Bruce Walton, Technical Director at RSA commented “In February the MAST users highlighted their priorities for taking the tool forward, less than seven months later we have implemented a raft of major new enhancements that deliver against these priorities and more. What is really exciting is that we have also been working on the next steps too and will be bringing more functionality online in the coming weeks.”

These enhancements to MAST Online keep it at the forefront of delivering the most powerful road casualty analysis tool in the country; offering Road Safety Professionals insight that no other tool provides. A summary of the development is provided below:

New Data

MAST now includes the entire 2010 STATS19 data, so MAST members can analyse the results in full several weeks before the release of Reported Road Casualties in Great Britain for the first time.

New Mosaic

MAST is now integrated with ‘New’ Mosaic Public Sector; a complete redesign of the Mosaic classification system that seeks to reflect some of the radical changes in British society over recent years.  New Mosaic has been designed to more responsive to some of the emerging issues that are reshaping society now and will continue to do so for years to come.  For the convenience of our members, MAST will also continue to provide full support the previous Mosaic classification system.

New Geographical Detail

In order to provide a greater level of detail about where casualties and drivers come from, as well as where crashes happened, MAST now allows users to view ‘Small Area Geographies’.  This means that, for the first time, users can drill down below the local authority level to hone in on specific problem areas.  These ‘Small Area Geographies’ are Super Output Areas (SOA) in England and Wales and Intermediate Data Zones (IDZ) in Scotland.

New Bespoke Portraits

MAST now comes with bespoke road safety specific portraiture for every New Mosiac Group and Type.  We commissioned these from Experian in order to increase the clarity and focus of information now available to MAST users.

Whilst an overview of key features, rankings and regional distribution are retained, other data variables come to the fore. Cars per household, travel to work, experience of speeding traffic and dangerous driving in the community appear alongside the all-important communications preferences and media consumption data; including internet usage.

New Dimensions

Indices of Multiple Deprivation

As well as updates to Mosaic and the geographical layers within MAST, another new feature of this update is the addition of driver and casualty indices of multiple deprivation, which will provide a further insight into who is involved in crashes.

More Vehicle Details

The Department for Transport has specially supplied MAST with vehicle details such as engine capacity and vehicle propulsion. This information has been derived from the vehicle registration mark and will allow us to add more information (such as vehicle colour and age) in the future.

If you head on over to the Mapping page you can find out more about the showcase solution that will be live on the website for  the next couple of months, prior to any roll-out of further analysis (at which point it will be only available to MAST members).  There is a short YouTube video there where I show you how to use the thematic maps but even without that, it’s pretty easy to use.  Hopefully it will all make sense and you will begin to appreciate the possibilities for future uses.

One simple way we can help MAST Members is by carrying out more analysis on different road safety issues.  For example, create a map by Highway Authority of motorcycle crash rates by population, or road length, or motor vehicle ownership etc.  If we are to embark on this then we probably need to know from Members what issues need investigating first (cue another survey).

It is likely that we need to create some new mapping layers other than just Highway Authority.  We can easily cover all of the standard geographies within the MAST system, even including the new Small Area geographies.  You may have some geography suggestions yourself (wards, parliamentary constituencies, postcode districts) and this is something we can look to bring in in the future.

Carrying out the analysis offline at our offices and uploading it to the web is pretty straightwarward and will meet many people’s requirements, but not the if you want to to customise the results.  The biggest challenge for us at the moment is to make the mapping solution fully flexible, allowing you to export your analysis from the MAST system into an online map.  There are two hurdles to overcome before this is a reality, one financial and one technological.

If we are to create individual user accounts there will be a costs associated, payable by the MAST Members themselves on top of the existing membership fee.  The likely costs using eSpatial are not very high though (thanks to their not-for-profit licencing option) meaning individual members could have their own private logons for around £500 per year.

The technological solution is going to require a little more thought, as well as some changes to MAST and some user training.  Basically we need to produce an export from MAST in a standard format that can then be imported by an individual user, easily, into the GIS system.  A potential methodology has been identified that is a little complex but we want to make it as simple and quick as possible.  We hope to create a solution that will allow MAST Members to produce online maps from any piece of analysis within 15 minutes and once we’re there, we’ll let you know!

There is one other important point of course; access to MOSIAC data at local levels.  Right now we are unable to publish the raw Experian data at any level lower than local authority district.  We hope to come to an agreement over this in the next few months, especially if MAST Member authorities also have a full MOSAIC licence.  Another case of ‘watch this space’.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the solution we are demonstrating here doesn’t meet your requirements!  Perhaps you want to see collisions mapped on the road network via an online GIS system – not something we are considering at the moment.  In any case, we welcome your feedback, positive or negative.

Richard Owen – Director, Road Safety Analysis

At the end of June official figures confirmed that 2010 had been the lowest year on record for road deaths in Britain with 1,857 reported nationwide. Whilst this is remarkable progress, it is just a decade since the figure was over 3,400 deaths per year, there are many who are concerned that we will not continue to make headway unless aiming for a reduction that far exceeds the new government forecast.

Published in May, the Strategic Framework for Road Safety sets out the intentions of Government for reducing road casualties over the next 20 years. This includes a forecast for 2020 when the Department for Transport hopes that we might have further reduced the death toll to 1,770 per annum; representing only a further 4.7% saving against last year’s record low.

The concern among leading voices in the profession and among politicians who have previously been responsible for road safety is that aiming for 0.5% reduction each year for the next ten years is out of step with the efforts being made across Europe and the globe. On the same day as the framework was unveiled, the UN drew back the curtain on a Decade of Action for Road Safety, meanwhile the European Commission set a target in December for reducing road deaths across the EU by 50%.

Dan Campsall, a Director of Road Safety Analysis and one of the signatories to the letter said: “At a time when the rest of the world is rolling their sleeves up to go further and faster in reducing the intolerable effect of road death and injury on our communities, we are holding back. The societal and economic costs of road traffic collisions are enormous, we cannot afford to place them on one side and hope that in 10 years’ time that we might just have made some progress. We have to take up the challenge of making the roads a safer place for all; regardless of age or social advantage.”

To see the full letter and list of signatories, please click here.

Over the last two years, MAST Online has provided Britain’s road safety profession with unprecedented levels of access to national data, enabling analysis and profiling to levels of quality and insight we would scarcely have thought possible before. You wouldn’t think such an important and widely acknowledged achievement could possibly come with a down side, but in a strange way it does. I’m reminded of what happened after I surprised my children with a present of the latest video game featuring their favourite characters: it gave them many happy hours of play, but also left them insisting “Now you’ve got to give us the next one in the series, Daddy!”

The MAST concept has almost limitless potential as a basis for planning intelligence led interventions – so much, in fact that it’s hard to know which way to turn first. In this blog, I’ll discuss how we are going to move MAST forward over the next few months, driven as ever by the priorities of our members. Each heading below features a common request, followed by an outline of our plans for meeting it. I can only hope these responses leave you feeling more satisfied than my kids were, when I told them they had to “wait and see what comes along at Christmas.”

“We need the latest data more quickly – sometimes it’s over a year out of date”

We agree. Until now, national data release has always been predicated on the publication schedule of RCGB, which doesn’t come along until the September after each year end. However, having discussed this matter with colleagues in the Department for Transport we now foresee two important developments.
Firstly, we expect the full national data set to be released on Road Casualties Online as soon as processing is complete, rather than waiting for RCGB. This will enable us to update MAST with 2010 data by 15 August, about six weeks earlier than was possible before.

Secondly, we hope to provide an interim update covering the first six months of 2011 alongside release of DfT’s second quarterly estimates this December. This update would be shown separately from validated annual data and may not have every single dimension fully populated, but it will be an important step in the direction of satisfying widespread demand for faster information more fitting to the age of the internet.

By the way, if you would like to see your data even more quickly than this, here are two suggestions for how you could take it forward. Firstly, you could approach us to discuss the possibility of a MAST Local Data Portal covering your area. Secondly, encourage your local police force to adopt the Crash reporting back end, which is the best way to move towards a live national dataset.

“We need to see more detail on the location of crashes”

This request has come along in several guises. For those who want a sharper focus on neighbourhood risk, I can bring you some very good news here and now. MAST will release Crash Location at Small Area level along with the 2010 data this August. By the way, “Small Area” is our generic term embracing both super output areas in England and Wales and data zones in Scotland.

For those wishing to perform route analysis, a reminder that MAST already enables you to do this. If you haven’t yet checked out the Filter by Road Number feature and the Crash Strategic Road Location dimension – why not?

For those who want more information about mapping with MAST data, we will not keep you waiting too long. We have been working feverishly on investigating mapping solutions to enhance MAST, and good things will come to those who wait. Just don’t forget to put out the hot chocolate and cookies by the fireplace before you go to bed!
For those not satisfied by any of the above – for instance, if you are being asked to provide detailed analysis at ward or junction level – you may find that a MAST Local Data Portal is the best solution to your needs. If you would like to discuss this further, please get in touch.

“I wish we knew more about what these drivers are really like … “

Now you will. I can announce that as from this summer MAST will include several important new dimensions, providing yet more unparalleled intelligence into drivers involved in crashes. These will include among others Driver Index of Multiple Deprivation, Vehicle Age and Vehicle Engine Size. For good measure, we’ll include Casualty Index of Multiple Deprivation too. This is not something we will stand still on either, as we are looking to expand this still further in future years. We hear those of you who want to see Vehicle Colour, Driver Years Licensed and so on, and you can rest assured we’re working on it.

However, there are one or two things we can’t do. Many of you want information based on driver breath tests or drivers without insurance, but theses cannot be released for data protection reasons. There are some other things which are not recorded with sufficient consistency to be released at national level. However, if you know that your local data contains (say) driver crash history or corporate vehicle ownership and you would like to include this in MAST-style analysis, then again a MAST Local Data Portal would be your best way forward.

“OK I know the numbers – but I need to know the rates.”

Expressing results as rates is very much the flavour of the month in road safety at the moment, what with the publication of Outcome Indicators in the Strategic Framework. Rates by distance travelled and by population are going to become an indispensible tool in future, and here at RSA we’re very much in the vanguard of this move. Of course MAST has already made Mosiac Indexing a commonplace tool for many road safety professionals, and our groundbreaking Child Resident Casualty Risk report last year attracted a great deal of interest.

Many of you want to see MAST reports indexed by population age and gender, which would not only greatly enhance MAST’s existing Mosaic profiles but would also be hugely valuable in setting other MAST reports into valuable context. This is not quite as straightforward as it sounds, demanding both reliable and consistent source data and significant development investment. However we recognise that there is huge road safety value in providing our members with this facility, so I can confirm that we definitely aim to integrate population, age and traffic indexing into MAST over the next year. I expect that this functionality to be integrated into MAST gradually, but I intend to have the first instalment ready for release before Christmas – in time for you to tell us that we got it wrong at next year’s user conference!

Oh, and about those Key Outcome Indicators in the Strategic Framework: we will make sure that our members have easy access to authoritative information on where their performance stands. RSA will be leading the way on calculating and assessing the KOIs, thus helping you to stay ahead of the game.

“I want to know why these crashes happened!”

Doesn’t everyone! Again, this issue has several different facets which I will discuss separately.

One thing we can and will do to assist analysis in the meantime is provide more of our “Crash Involved …” dimensions, which have proved extremely popular. I’m pleased to announce that the following member requests will be included in MAST when the 2010 data is released this summer:

We will continue to keep this area of development under review, so if you have additional comments or suggestions then please post them on the MAST User Forum. We’re very grateful for all the suggestions for new report templates in the survey, and we will be releasing some new templates based on your suggestions later in the year. By the way, don’t forget that you can also use our “Casualty … Related” fields to good effect. There are some good ones already there, including Journey Purpose of Related Driver and Manoeuvre of Related Vehicle. Again, if you have suggestions for any additions then please share them with us on the forum.

Now on to the continuing debate about our old friends the Contributory Factors. In our recent user survey we canvassed your opinions on whether and how they should be released, something which those of you who have worked in collision analysis will know is far from straightforward. 89% of you agreed that they should be made available in some form, and the most popular approach was that “CF data should be shown in more detailed groups devised by MAST, for example ‘Driver Injudicious due to Excessive and/or Inappropriate Speed’ “.

With this clear aspiration on CFs in the forefront of our minds, we discussed how to progress this with our colleagues in DfT. They kindly supplied us with a sample CF dataset for analysis, and we in turn provided them with a sample of how this data would look if published in MAST. We are hopeful that once everyone has had a chance to consider the outcome of this confidential trial, we will receive the go-ahead to publish additional dimensions based on CFs in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, if you happen to bump into anyone from DfT at an event, don’t forget to mention it …

Finally, there is one thing which some people might like but we will not release on a national basis. A number of police forces tend to record the vehicle considered by the attending officer to have precipitated a crash as ‘Vehicle One’ on the stats form, and some have used this during analysis in lieu of a formal ‘Precipitating Vehicle’ field. In our survey your views were divided: only 21% of you had a high degree of confidence of this connotation in your local data, and conversely 15% of you considered that vehicle numbers held no meaning whatever. In light of this widespread uncertainty, we feel it would be misleading to the point of irresponsibility to publish this information. However, if you are confident in your local data containing this or any other significance which MAST is unable to exploit, then don’t forget that a Local Data Portal could be the answer to your dreams!

Well, there we go – quite a shopping list. I’m sure you will agree that MAST is continuing to respond effectively to the needs of its member base, and as ever we look forward to your views on the progress which we have made at the next User Conference. If you would like to contribute your thoughts on what MAST has done for you and where it should go next, then please get in touch with us or post on the forum.

MAST is the analysis tool, delivered online allowing ease of access to road casualty data and integrated socio-demographic profiling of casualties and drivers.

The award aims to identify and celebrate good road safety practice and the judging panel were keen to recognise the way in which MAST online has contributed to the road safety community nationally; their comments concluded:

“MAST creates the circumstances for all education and publicity campaigns to be properly targeted and efficient initiatives, which is particularly important with constrained budgets and fewer easy sites left to treat with conventional engineering measures.”

Accepting the award, RSA Marketing Director Dan Campsall commented “This is the culmination of over 5 years working on laying the foundations for and developing the MAST project.  We are hugely grateful for the support of many professionals nationwide who have helped to shape MAST & make it the vital tool it has become.”

RSA Technical Director & MAST Project Manager Bruce Walton expressed his delight at winning the award and his aspirations for MAST in the future: “The feedback from users shows just how widely MAST is now being used to develop innovative schemes on a solid evidential basis.  We are really pleased that this award recognises their good work and underlines the important role that MAST can play in taking road safety forward during tough economic times. With further developments soon to be unveiled the already unrivalled insight that MAST can offer professionals is only set to improve.”

RSA will be presenting a summary of the work already undertaken at the CIHT Showcase Seminar on 21^st June for which spaces are still available (visit www.ciht.org.uk)

You can download a copy of the full award submission from here

A copy of the full press release is available here

1. MAST development priorities
2. Supply of more frequent and additional DfT data
3. Training and bespoke services
4. Conference and general MAST feedback

This report covers the first and last categories with further updates on the remaining issues coming soon.

MAST Development Priorities

We asked users to rank 14 planned developments to enable us to prioritise our development resources in the coming year.  The results showed that there was a good deal of support for all of the developments and that the top 5 all achieved very high levels of support (higher than 3.9 out of 5 on the priority scale).  In fact, all but the lowest-ranked development proposal scored more than 3 on the priority scale which hopefully shows that there is a great deal of support for further developing MAST’s features.

After assessing the time required to carry out the changes, we can confirm our commitment to implement the following features in the next MAST update:

• Index of Multiple Deprivation Deciles – Drivers and Casualties
• Super Output Areas

The ‘Quarterly updates’ and ‘More vehicle data’ developments will be considered in a separate article to be published soon.

The issue of indexing reports by population, age and traffic were all quite high on the list and are currently being investigated in more detail.  We have access to a number of data sets which could be used and our preference is to get population & age data at a postcode level if possible.   With the recent publication of the DfT’s Strategic Framework for Road Safety, casualty rates have become a national priority for measuring success.  Those of you who have taken the time to read through the document in detail will be aware that the new ‘Outcome Indicators’ rely on the use of casualty rates, rather than raw figures and this is something we will also be implementing in MAST as soon as possible.  At the moment we can’t say whether all of those indexes will be available at the time of the next update.  We will be producing a report in the summer though showing how performance varies across the country and this will be sent to all MAST members as a priority.

Of particular interest to me was the overwhelming support for ‘Fully-automated online thematic mapping’.  We have been considering what options are available to us and have contacted several suppliers of online mapping technologies to see what can be developed.  If we are to offer a fully-integrated solution then this would involve installing GIS software on the current MAST web-server and accessing the same ‘data cubes’ before presenting the result to the end user via a web interface.  Unfortunately the costs of the software licences alone are in excess of £50,000 per year and that’s before development costs and a higher-spec server required to process the maps.  This means that we have to rule out an ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ solution for the time being – unless we double the MAST membership fees!  We have however been able to identify a more cost effective solution that can be licenced per user using pre-analysed data which could cover 80% of the mapping capabilities at a fraction of the cost.  As it’s a per-user licence, individual members can chose whether they want to add this to their MAST membership.  It’s very early days but the trials have been positive and I will post further updates in the coming months with the hope to have a suitable system available in the autumn.

Conference and general MAST feedback

The majority of people who commented said the location of the conference was good or excellent with only two commenting that it was a poor choice.  The venue itself was highly praised with more than half saying it was ‘Excellent’ (we will pass on your praise).  As far as the content was concerned, more than two-thirds described Bruce’s ‘Bite-size’ presentations as ‘Excellent’ and the other content was also highly-praised.  We wanted to create a conference with a different ‘feel’ and it seems to have paid off.

We asked how we could support you in the coming year and of those who responded, 64% said they would welcome another annual event, 47% would like to become members of a regional user-group, and 34% would like to see more reports covering national issues.  We will take this on board and consider what we can do to support the regional user-groups in the coming months.  Another annual conference early next year seems a certainty and we may well use the same venue as it proved popular.

Finally we asked people what they thought of our support services.  All were supportive of the Wiki, forum and YouTube channel; although there wasn’t much interest in the Twitter feed!  We will continue to develop these services and update them as we carry out new developments.

Author:  Richard Owen – Operations Director, Road Safety Analysis

The change in MAST’s stewardship from DfT grant with operational support from the Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership (TVSRP), to management by RSA has proved to be an excellent model but the two operations (TVSRP & RSA) were still intertwined, notably sharing offices and personnel.    When it became clear at the start of this year that all employment through TVSRP would be lost in the absence of a Specific Road Safety Grant, the team were working pretty furiously to find a sustainable model for the business, and security of employment for the team.

With the enormous support of the 6 Highway Authorities in Berkshire and their shared commitment to work together on road safety initiatives, ‘Safer Roads’ has been retained – to be managed directly by RSA. Very different to the partnership from the old cost recovery days, the new service is highly focussed on improving efficiency in service delivery, supporting front line road safety staff, sharing expertise and carrying forward some of the excellent work that has emerged over the last few years.

Safer Roads (www.saferroads.org) has been the vital ingredient that has allowed RSA to grow from 1.2 staff primarily supporting MAST & Road Casualties Online, to a team who are able to offer a wider range of services and far greater security to the projects we have developed. Initiatives such as Area Profiling & new management tools like the enforcement reporting tool, V-Four, have all been protected by the move with RSA retaining its not-for-profit emphasis.

Taking the ‘Safer Roads’ brand under the auspices of RSA has also ensured that a range of communications campaigns such as the Prince Michael Award winning ‘Have a Kip’ campaign or the highly regarded ‘Safer Rider’, with its multi-million views YouTube viral, social media engagement, and training connections, are all continuing to the benefit of members.

With the growing range of services that now come under the umbrella of Road Safety Analysis, we have also just launched a new corporate website.  Pay the site a visit at www.roadsafetyanalysis.co.uk where you will find more details on the services we are able to offer and projects we are supporting.

So, like the mythical phoenix from the ashes, Road Safety Analysis has emerged as a stronger and more rounded organisation as a result of all the changes.  From moments when we thought we might all be out of work to a situation where the company has been able to give significant security to the projects it manages; MAST has probably never been more sustainable, nor the horizon looked so promising as we continue on the journey.

This blog was written by Dan Campsall, one of the directors of Road Safety Analysis, who is now sharing his time between supporting MAST and other online technology developments and the new focus on developing a new sort of multi-sectoral collaboration in road safety with colleagues in Berkshire.