AA Yellow Paper 2024
The AA’s yellow paper focuses on driver safety and the importance of looking after drivers’ wellbeing.
Driving is changing.
Technology, regulation and infrastructure are evolving rapidly, and this will impact our future mobility. No matter how good the technology, the safety of drivers, passengers, all other road users, and pedestrians is paramount.
We shouldn’t be at all complacent about road fatalities, as every death or injury is preventable. This is why we’ve written this paper. When we consider fleet risk, there are three key areas: people, infrastructure, and vehicles.
Here, we’re shining the spotlight on the risks around people and how these can be managed.
As humans we’re complex beings and, while technology may be evolving at pace to increase our safety behind the wheel, the greatest factor that determines the risk of a collision is human behaviour.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) around 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic incidents. This is estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death across all age groups globally – and this is set to rise. Tragically it is also the leading cause of death amongst the younger age group.
Overall road traffic incidents are predicted to become the seventh leading cause of death by 2030.
In the UK, someone is killed or seriously injured on UK roads every 16 minutes (Department for Transport). We cannot allow this to continue. For businesses, driving can be one of the most dangerous activities that your employees will do.
Around a third of road deaths involve someone driving for work (UCL and Agilysis).
So, to make a truly positive difference to road safety and fulfil our legal duty of care as employers, it’s time to elevate the importance of human factors and driving.
In an environment of rapid change, our drivers are likely to need more support than ever. We need to think beyond just practical steps, such as licence checking and incident reporting, and really explore what it means be ‘fit to drive’.
It’s time to firmly turn our attention to the human factors that impact driving and what these mean as we move towards a new world of mobility, with advancing technology and fundamental changes to how we use vehicles. It’s an incredibly exciting period of change, with huge opportunities for improvement that will make transport safer, more sustainable, and efficient.
At The AA, our aim is to create confidence for drivers, making sure they have the right help and support they need at every stage of their driving lives. This is why we recently launched our motoring manifesto, ‘Creating Confidence for Drivers’. A key part of this is safety on the roads, we believe road death needs to be higher on the political agenda and there needs to be a dedicated multi-agency approach to tackle the issue. Our hope is that this manifesto helps shape a better road ahead for all drivers. So, let’s work together to make safer roads a reality.
Edmund King OBE
AA President
