At Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, ITS UK brought together MPs, council leaders and transport technology experts to ask a simple question: how can technology make our transport system safer?

The answer we heard around the table was encouraging but at times frustrating. The technology to save lives on our roads and help people feel safer on public transport exists, yet, in too many cases, is held back by procurement, approvals, legislation, awareness and a lack of joined-up thinking.

Ruth Cadbury MP, Chair of the Transport Select Committee, opened the discussion by setting out the scale of the challenge. The Government wants to cut the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads by 65% by 2035. It has also pledged to halve violence against women and girls within a decade.

Both are bold goals, and meeting them will take technology and people working together. Here is what we heard.

Road safety: the tools are ready, the system isn’t

After decades as a world leader in road safety, the UK’s progress has stalled since 2010. Participants warmly welcomed the new Road Safety Strategy, and the conversation quickly turned to how to deliver it.

Police forces are asking for better tools to tackle the behaviours which cause most deaths and serious injuries: speeding, drink and drug driving, using a phone at the wheel and not wearing a seatbelt. Cameras that can spot drivers using a phone or not wearing a seatbelt already exist and are used overseas.

The problem is getting this kind of equipment approved domestically. New road enforcement devices, and even updates to existing ones, can take years to clear the UK approval process currently decided by the Home Office, whereas other countries, such as the Netherlands, offer much faster, more predictable routes. As a result, a sector where the UK once led the world is now held back by its own home market.

Councils face similar hurdles. One local leader described how it took his local area five years from starting a traffic enforcement pilot to issuing the first fine. Others pointed out that councils pay to maintain speed cameras but don’t see the income from them, making it difficult for some to justify the cost of installing more.

Where councils have been able to invest, new data is changing how they understand risk. Councils have traditionally judged whether a road has a speeding problem by looking at how fast most drivers go. If most keep to the limit, the road is seen as safe, even if a few are driving far too fast. AI monitoring can now catch the execptions, including, in one real example, drivers doing “70mph in 30mph zones during the school run”. It has also shown that many near misses happen at zebra crossings, where pedestrians, assuming the crossing makes them safe, step out while looking at their phones, and drivers aren’t paying enough attention.

The roundtable discussed that this shows why investing in innovation is so important. Trials like these are proving the case for the technology and can uncover information that could save lives. In this case, the council used the data to introduce physical measures to slow traffic on roads where residents had raised concerns for years.

Public transport: feeling safe, not just being safe

The second half of the discussion turned to buses, trains and trams, and in particular to the safety of women and girls on the transport network.

One point that cut across the discussion was that safety is about the whole journey. The walk to the bus stop, the wait in the dark and the walk between station and interchanges all shape whether someone feels safe enough to travel. When they don’t, they drive or stay at home – around half of women avoid buses after dark, and many older people have still not returned to buses since the pandemic.

The journey starts with planning, and uncertainty itself can be a barrier. Sat-navs made it simple to drive almost anywhere, removing the uncertainty from car journeys. Public transport needs to offer the same confidence: that the journey will be easy to plan, easy to follow, predictable and safe from start to finish.

A place or travel route can be safe on paper and still feel unsafe, and that feeling alone is enough to stop people travelling. Participants all agreed that making transport safer for women and girls makes it safer for everyone and would be good for ridership.

Part of feeling safe is knowing that help is at hand if something goes wrong. Yet – as an attendee told the table – only around 17% of women report sexual harassment on public transport, and too many incidents are brushed off as “normal”. Some useful tools already exist, but few people know about them. On trains, you can text the British Transport Police on 61016, and the information screens in many carriages also contain CCTV cameras. Buses, however, don’t yet have an equivalent national service.

Participants saw this gap as a real problem. On a bus, the driver’s priority has to be driving, and there is usually no one else on board to turn to. Where several companies run services, there is no single number to report to or remember. Ride-hailing apps already let passengers raise an alarm at the touch of a button, and participants asked why bus passengers can’t expect the same.

Whilst technology is trying to fill the gap, the result has so far been fragmented. There are more than 400 women’s safety apps available, which shows both the demand for greater safety and the confusion that lacking a cohesive, common approach lends. Participants argued that better use of data could help, for example by recording which bus stops are well lit or covered by CCTV – journey planners could then use this data to suggest safer routes.

Throughout, participants were clear that digital infrastructure is social infrastructure, and that technology must not leave people behind. Some people will never use a smartphone, from children without phones to older passengers. Paper tickets, staff and other non-digital options still matter.

Two halves of the same conversation

We planned the roundtable in two halves, one on roads and one on public transport. By the end, it was clear that both domains are part of one bigger conversation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in rural areas, where bus networks have shrunk dramatically. Young people who need to get to college often have no choice but to learn to drive at 17, and young drivers are among those most at risk on our roads. Better public transport is a road safety measure too.

There are signs of what can work. A Member of Parliament described a locally funded night bus pilot in a rural town. Within weeks it coincided with the lowest levels of anti-social behaviour and attacks on women on record, and the police stepped in to keep it running. The example showed how small, practical ideas and whole system thinking can make a real difference.

But pilots like this often depend on goodwill and short-term funding. The biggest gaps are in places without the combined authorities and joined-up systems that big cities enjoy. Tickets and apps that work smoothly in one region often stop at the border of the next. Our participants were keen to find practical ways for neighbouring areas to work together and share these benefits.

Thank you

A big thank you to everyone who joined us in Liverpool, to Transport Select Committee Chair Ruth Cadbury MP for opening the discussion, and to our partners Jenoptik, Smart Applications Management and Magellan, who made the event possible.