Beyond Collision Counts: A Behavioural Approach to Evaluating Road Safety Interventions
Holly Hope Smith, Head Behavioural Scientist at SoMoCo, gave a great presentation at this year’s National Road Safety Conference.
Every year, hundreds of new road safety interventions are delivered across the UK, from local engineering schemes to national campaigns. Yet all too often, their success is judged only by collision and KSI data - events that are exceptionally rare and tell us little about whether an intervention has truly made travel safer.
At NSRC 2025, I spoke about why evaluating interventions through a behavioural lens gives us faster, more rigorous feedback on what’s working and why. By measuring the behaviours that lead to collisions, such as harsh braking, risky crossings, and near misses, we can see progress long before casualty data change. Mapping the core features of how your intervention works can also inform your evaluation. Do road users notice the sign, recall the message, or express a shift in attitude or confidence that will reduce risk?
A behavioural lens doesn’t replace engineering or enforcement; it strengthens them, helping us design interventions that fit how people actually think, decide, and move.
It was brilliant to share the stage with colleagues who are also embedding behavioural science into road safety. Each used logic models and behaviour change theory to underpin their evaluations, giving confidence that interventions worked as intended:
Annabelle Priest & Kerry Doyle - standardising road safety interventions for young drivers across Fire & Rescue Services.
Dr Michelle Rayner-Gray & Dr Julie Gandolfi - combining telematics and self-report data to assess older driver interventions.
Dr Jo Barnes - pragmatic evaluation of School Streets in Newcastle.
Samuel Scott & Tony Heywood - evaluating Biker Down to support post-collision motorcyclist safety.
Dr Carol Hawley – standardised assessments for mature drivers.
Dr Elizabeth Box – behaviourally informed Highway Code interventions.
Together, these examples show how behavioural approaches are now becoming integral to UK road safety and that logic-model-based evaluation provides a clear framework for testing and refining what works.
We also shared a preview of our new Behavioural Science Training for Road Safety Practitioners, which equips professionals with practical toolkits to apply a behavioural lens to their own road safety challenges and design, test and evaluate behaviour-led interventions. Send me a message and I'd be happy to share details.
If you want to move beyond collision counts in your own evaluations and measure the change that really matters, we’d love to talk.